As I read the daily newspapers in December 2025, I began to feel haunted by a film scene: an American army captain, played by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, rests on a knoll above Utah Beach while seawater rolls ashore crimson with blood. I read in the paper that a total of five hundred thousand or more combatants had been killed during Russia’s war against Ukraine, that around seventy thousand lives had been lost during the ongoing Israeli occupation of Gaza, and that fourteen million people had been displaced by the civil war in Darfur. As Christmas neared, two antisemites killed sixteen people and wounded forty at a seaside Hanukkah celebration in Australia, a gunman killed two people and wounded nine at a university in Rhode Island, and a social-media post from the president of the United States seemed to celebrate the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their drug-addicted son. Killing had become banal. Casualties and murders were being tabulated like debits in an accounting ledger, and cruelty was fashionable at the highest levels of government. I found myself searching the paper for some sign that mercy and kindness had survived all this routine exsanguination.
The year 2026 began just as dishearteningly as 2025 had ended. The bloodshed in Ukraine, Gaza, and Darfur continued; the United States attacked Venezuela; and by April, the United States and Israel were launching missiles at Iran. The White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, defended the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan oil reserves by declaring that ours is a world that is “governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Miller’s statement called to my mind one of the several narrators of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, who declares that the Spanish ravaging of Aztec civilization was conducted in “the spirit of malice which underlies men’s lives and against which nothing offers resistance.”
I suppose it is a symptom of lurking desperation that I gather less hope from contemporary news reports than from certain ancient myths that consider the origin and substrate of humanity. Some readers of Genesis 1–3 like to suppose, as I do, that Adam eats of the forbidden fruit because he knows Eve, having already eaten, will be banished from paradise: he loves her so deeply that he would rather suffer and die with her than live eternally in her absence. This romantic and creative reading of the story reminds me of the Siksikaitsitapi creation myth in which Old Man, the creator, can’t decide whether humans should be mortal or immortal and therefore subjects each individual to an endlessly repeated cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The first woman suggests, “I will throw this stone into the water; if it floats, we will always live, if it sinks, people must die, that they may always be sorry for each other.” Old Man agrees. The stone of course sinks, as the woman must have expected, and humanity is introduced to both sympathy and permanent death. It can be said that in the Siksikaitsitapi myth the creator is somewhat indifferent to the fate of humans, while the first woman prefers a mortal life of empathetic fellowship to an eternal but emotionally sterile existence. And it can be said that Adam and Eve, whatever their transgression, never act with cruelty toward each other—or even toward their serpentine tempter. According to hopeful readings of both myths, humans are meant to love one another in a world that is often indifferent or cruel. Where, then, does all the violence come from? Sometimes, to those with short memories, it seems to have come out of nowhere.
In the time of my own beginning, my childhood years of the early 1960s, Americans knew all too well about malice and bloodshed—Hitler was still fresh in the collective memory—but relatively few of us supposed that domestic mass murder would eventually shoot and bomb its way into the national zeitgeist. The idea that bloodshed might be as characteristic of America as apple pie would have been inconceivable back then, at least to those white Americans whose imaginations were stunted by their sketchy knowledge of U.S. history and their disregard for occasional news reports of tortures and executions committed by white supremacists in the South. President Kennedy had been assassinated, but his killer, who had once defected to the Soviet Union, was generally thought of as an aberration, a mutant traitor. And although the horrors of the Vietnam War were already underway, that bloodshed was halfway around the world, and few of us had family members serving in the military. In my hometown of Pendleton, New York, we tended to assume that domestic violence stemmed largely from the sale and use of illicit drugs and that most of it happened in ghettos. Sure, people complained that “the world is going to hell,” just as they do now, but in Pendleton, most of us felt safe and believed our nation was above any moral criticism. America, we presumed, was no more violent than any other place.
But because our neighborhood seemed dull to me and my boyhood friends, we occasionally enlivened it by arming ourselves with toy weapons and fighting mock wars. Perhaps influenced by the tactics of the Viet Cong as reported on the evening news, some of us hid in ambush while others, like the American and South Vietnamese troops, stalked the ambushers. An ambusher who spotted a stalker before the stalker spotted him would open fire—“Blam-blam!”—prompting the other boy to scream and collapse and still himself, his arms spread as if he had been crucified. Dying was almost as much fun as killing. Occasionally such pretend violence wasn’t enough, and then we dispensed with toy weapons and punished each other with apples, stones, or BBs. Perhaps we were reacting to the minor humiliations and anxieties that can result from growing up in the working class: the limited privacy of cramped homes, parents who couldn’t afford to clothe us in the latest style, arguments between our stifled mothers and factory-weary fathers, the neighborhood pecking order.
Although our mock-combat strategies seemed to be cribbed from televised war footage, which entertained me almost as much as the weekly episodes of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel, I never imagined I was killing VC or GI enemies during our neighborhood pretend battles. There was no real element of role-playing; we were usually content to slaughter each other as we were. There was an exception to this rule after my friend David showed me a small black-and-white photograph his father had brought home from his military service in World War II. I looked at it for several seconds before I fully understood that the hillock in the photo was composed of naked and hairless human corpses—all victims of the Shoah, left behind by retreating German forces. The next time I engaged in play war, I imagined I was a U.S. soldier in World War II and the other combatants were Nazis. A Nazi won.
Girls never joined our mock combat. They were seldom outside except when walking between houses to visit each other or when going to and from the school bus, in part because their safety was thought to be threatened by all the free-ranging boys. After a boy from across the road got off the bus with my sister Kim and me one afternoon, he slugged her in the shoulder because she had poked fun at him during the ride home. She collapsed while the yellow doors hissed shut and the bus began to growl away with its remaining cargo of yahoos. The boy was one of my friends, but I pummeled him until he, like Kim, was crying. That evening, after my father arrived home from the power plant where he was a welder, I told him what had happened. He praised me for protecting my sister, then yanked off his belt, looped it double, and strapped her for “starting trouble.”
Of course, the neighborhood parents loved their children, but occasionally a father’s idea of discipline led to that kind of physical abuse. I once witnessed a neighborhood man coldcock his mouthy teenage son. The same punishment was delivered to one of my friends from across town, who sounded proud of his father’s lightning right hook as he reported to me, “I’m mouthing off to my mother and next thing I know I wake up on my back looking at the ceiling and wondering what the hell happened.” It wasn’t only men who punished children physically. I once saw a female teacher yank a teenage boy out of class because he had cussed at her. As he continued to call her “bitch,” she began slapping him on the face—“bitch,” whack, “bitch,” whack—his head swinging side to side like a metronome pendulum. He eventually shut his mouth.
We working-class folk were fighters, but in some respects our pugnacity was futile. Pride wouldn’t allow the adults to admit it, but our families were at the mercy of the executives and stockholders who profited from the factories, mills, and other large businesses that used, and then disposed of, blue-collar skill and labor. Blue-collar employees were proud of the work they performed, or at least their endurance of it, but their jobs damaged their lungs, wore out their knees, ruptured their lumbar discs, and drove them half-crazy with tedium. When corporations moved industrial production out of western New York to states and countries where unions had been eviscerated, executives expressed hollow sympathy to their laid-off employees who had sacrificed so much. Company spokespeople parroted excuses that could all be reduced to “It’s just business.” As for the formerly powerful labor unions, Billy Joel nailed it in “Allentown” with his lyric, “And the union people crawled away.”
The working class of western New York survived mostly intact until after I left home permanently in 1976, but direct and indirect economic violence was already destroying the minds, bodies, and living standards of some of the adults in my neighborhood. Violence was also modeled at home and in school as a just retribution for other violence. And for disrespect. And theft. I can’t recall anyone except my Methodist minister quoting Jesus’ command to “turn the other cheek.”
On a Sunday morning when I was fourteen, I tore a bit of paper from a hymnal, made it into a spit wad, and bounced it off the head of a kid who was sitting two pews ahead of me. In school the next day, he challenged me to a fight for having disrespected him—or as he phrased it, “Fucking around with me in church.” I thought my fellow Methodist was merely overreacting, but at the end of the school day, when I showed up at the spot where we were supposed to meet, I understood why he wished to fight me: he had beckoned a wake of vultures to watch him beat up a small boy two years younger than he was. The fight commenced and the vultures cheered and jeered until a teacher cut short the entertainment. The following day, the school principal called me out of class and asked why I had been fighting. To my explanation, he responded, “That’s what you get for throwing spit wads.” He then called the other boy out of class—a troublemaker already well known to the principal—and said, “You like to fight, huh?” He repeatedly shoved the boy against a row of lockers; it sounded like someone was beating a kettle drum. After the boy was reduced to tears and sent back to class, the principal said to me, “Don’t fight in school again.” I promised him I wouldn’t. I had no wish to become a locker ornament.
But two years later, in a locker room, I broke the promise. I had changed into my gym shorts and was talking with a friend when I heard my wallet, which had been in a back pocket of my pants, slap the floor. I turned and saw my lunch dollar clutched in the hand of a boy I knew only vaguely. I beat on him all the way up one row of lockers and down another, then found my gym teacher and reported the theft as well as the assault. He seemed pleased: for weeks, someone had been stealing money and other items from lockers, and now the teacher knew who it was. After the principal was informed, the thief was suspended from school for several days. But I was patted on the back, literally.
I would soon witness how serious violence could become even in my fairly staid town. I attended a Saturday-night party thrown by a senior whose parents were out of town. It got underway in the usual Bacchic manner of unsupervised teenage parties: smoking, drinking, music, dancing, necking, braying, vomiting. Yet the boy sitting on the carpet next to me had a black eye and scabbed lip from a brawl in the nearby city of Lockport. He wasn’t drinking or talking and was so rigid that he reminded me of my grandmother’s corpse at her funeral. He was glaring at the door on the other side of the parlor where, eventually, three boys entered the house together, one of them wearing a Lockport High School varsity jacket. Apparently, someone had set them up, extending what they took to be a benign invitation.
The boy next to me and several others launched from their seats to attack the Lockport boys. It’s quite possible that none of the three had ever harmed someone from Pendleton, but I suppose anyone from Lockport would have been considered a suitable target. I saw, in a blur of violence, one of the Lockport boys spit out blood and teeth while a case of bowling trophies was overturned, shards of glass and fragments of trophies covering the blood-splattered carpet. The host of the party said, “My father’s gonna kill me.”
Our host later loaded his father’s shotgun and toted it outside to threaten Lockport boys who soon arrived in a long line of cars with the intention of extracting retribution. The house emptied as some of us partygoers prepared to fight. Others fled the property or went back inside. Our host stumbled toward the road and pointed the gun muzzle at the lead car. A minute or so later, the carloads of Lockport boys departed without further incident.
Several years ago, I spent a few days in Norman, Oklahoma, at the home of my childhood friend Andy Strout. Our conversation eventually turned to Timothy McVeigh and his 1995 Oklahoma City bombing attack that killed 168 people and injured 684. After McVeigh’s arrest, Time writer George J. Church visited the killer’s hometown in western New York and wrote, “How Timothy McVeigh, coming from this background, could have grown into an embittered right-wing loner is not easy to imagine.” When I first heard that McVeigh was from my hometown of Pendleton, I confess I was surprised. But I was even more surprised when I realized that many reporters and pundits had trouble imagining how a terrorist could have roots in a place where litter was scarce, lawns and flower beds glistened with chlorinated water, and American flags flapped on front-yard poles. They did not exactly say so, but they seemed surprised that the terrorist was from a town where the citizenry was white. I doubt that anyone today would be shocked to learn that an embittered right-wing loner is a white guy who grew up in middle-class America.
Our conversation about McVeigh led my friend Andy and me to discuss what I called the “violent undercurrent” of our childhood community. He and I recounted fist fights, skirmishes between boys from Pendleton and other towns, the high-school basketball game when dozens of fans from both schools ran onto the court to join a brawl between the teams. We also remembered a rape, two cases of men sexually molesting their daughters, a female church-school teacher who sexually abused a number of children, and a boy who killed a woman while driving around town and shooting randomly into houses. Why shouldn’t McVeigh come from a town like Pendleton?
Then Andy added a broad brushstroke of light to the childhood hellscape we had been painting. He said, “But there was much goodness, too,” and began to speak of how kind our high-school principal had been to him. And that reminded me of how I misunderstood the emotional grace I had experienced on a summer afternoon when I was playing lackadaisical basketball with my friends David and Johnny. The three of us had chatted disjointedly as we dribbled and shot—until I complained about “my old man” and his strict requirement that I keep my hair short. Suddenly my long-haired friends let the basketball bounce and roll from the driveway. David said we should all appreciate our parents more than we do. Johnny said I should be happy that my hair length pleased my father. I was stunned. I studied my two friends during the silence that followed. It would be a few more days before I understood why they had gently chastised me.
My father called our family to a meeting at the kitchen table. My mother arrived with a dish towel that, even though it was dry, she kept wringing. I believed I was about to hear that my parents were getting divorced. Instead, my father announced he had cancer. The malignancy had originated in “a gland called the prostate” before spreading into his pelvis and spine. He said that a boy in the neighborhood had heard his own parents talking about the cancer. “Your mother and me didn’t want you to know about this yet, but we don’t want you to hear it from someone before us.” I already knew that he had spent several days in a Buffalo hospital, but my sisters and I had been told he was undergoing surgery to correct a back injury. At the kitchen table, I learned that actually his prostate had been surgically removed “along with some other glands”—he didn’t specify they were his testicles—and that no other cancer treatment was available to him. “They say I could live another five years,” he said. “That would make me forty-five. That’s a lot of years, if you think about it.” He told us he had felt sorry for himself in the hospital until one evening when he walked the halls of the patient wings. “So if you ever start pitying yourself,” he added, “go to a hospital and look in the rooms. There’s always someone a lot worse off.”
Today I live among the sylvan foothills of the elevated Allegheny Plateau in southwestern New York. On the first morning of the deer-hunting season in November, gunfire is nearly as constant as birdsong is in May. I read one or two newspapers each morning in relative safety and comfort, although when I hear a reverberating shot I sometimes try to imagine—and sometimes try to keep from imagining—what my life might be like if I lived in one of the wartorn places I read about in the paper. A gunshot might cause me to recall the “Blam! Blam!” of the play wars I engaged in as a boy, the staged gunfire in Have Gun, Will Travel, or the adolescent party when a case of bowling trophies crashed to a bloody carpet. I try to keep from recalling the former Pendleton boy who detonated a bomb in Oklahoma City, but I do anyhow, and the explosion in my mind seems to forever submerge all other sound in the hills and hollows around my home. He did not come out of nowhere. The carnage had a history, and no one can see to the bottom of it.
A freshwater spring, which has sought warmth and light since probably the end of the Ice Age, shishes from the gravelly soil between two buttressed roots of a hollow and dying ash tree above my house and then begins its run downhill over fragments of shale speckled with fossilized shells of mollusks that lived in an ancient sea. The water is so cold that whenever one of my hands is submerged in it for more than a few seconds, my flesh is numbed. Some of the flow is piped to my house, where my children drank of it until they went off to college, where my wife drank of it, and where I still drink of it. The spring fills the acre pond where I fish and swim in summer; and where my geothermal heating system absorbs enough heat from the pond bottom in winter to keep my house at a comfortable temperature. My dog once broke through the pond ice, disappeared like Jonah into the maw of the Leviathan, and quickly rose back to the surface.
Everything I have ever known rose from a place I have never seen. A mystery. Into the tiny and brief life that is mine and into the cruelty and sublimity of the much larger world rose my father’s anger and his love, the births of my children and the death of my wife, my dog lost and saved, my hand numbed and my home warmed, and the gunfire and the birdsong.
We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to [email protected].
