People in the fields of peace/nonviolence remember that Gandhi once said, “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.” This Gandhi’s puzzle is curiously interesting in its fusing of violence with blindness. But it is not merely blindness in the physical sense that is at issue. I could imagine four other types of much more profound and somewhat more dangerous blindness. First, violence blinds those who suffer from its effects from seeing the complexity of causes that give rise to it. Second, in the cloud of anger, violence blinds its users to the lives of the innocent which have become no longer humans, but objects. Third, violence blinds people from the possibilities of existing alternatives because oftentimes it imprisons those connected with it in a seemingly endless cycle of violence governed by its own rhetoric and logic. Fourth, violence is blinding “us” in a sense of hopelessness which effectively undermines “our” potentials in working towards a more peaceful future.

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