oneword.com

Fighting back is really fighting forward. Creation must go forward; creation and forward are the same word.

There’s no such thing as punishing a sole person, let alone with justice. When you strike someone be it with fist, word, imprisonment or abandonment you strike untold many more but by the time the blows reach them it will have transformed and become untraceable. Your words that beat someone down may become a fist that beats someone down; a new force of violence – the prodigy of what you may have thought was just punishment – progressively out of control, for you, the origin, are by then long gone along with understanding. This is why justice is unattainable.

When this continuum is carried out for too long it afflicts too many and becomes the most destructive force of nature. Nations are built on it. Economies turn around it.
No act of punishment is small enough to be inconsequential; drop by drop they confluence out of control through the generations. And by now we are hit so early by it, so exactly, it appears to come from us when it is passing through us. It runs through families and society not by genes but by ancient adversity.

By now, all acts of affliction are ancient.