A need exists for a new term grouping together occupations which are related to violence, hence "violence workers". Using this concept, we see how many people make a living from doing violence, threatening violence, preventing violence, selling violence equipment, and even cleaning up the physical, psychological, ecological, and economic mayhem of violence. Once the economic interest in violence is named and made part of the language, we can make better sense of our culture.

By the above definition, some examples of violence workers could include soldiers, drug dealers, parole officers, DEA agents, muggers, cops, prison guards, boxers, national security bureaucrats, at times lawyers and judges, and sometimes even airplane engineers, emergency room staff, chaplains, think-tank intellectuals, and chemists. Propagandists for violence are clearly violence workers. Sylvester Stallone and John Wayne are violence workers even if the quality of their violence is cartoon-fake.

We should differentiate between primary violence workers such as soldiers, and secondary ones such as a tax collector (after all, about half the money the IRS collects goes into the military budget). Sex workers who service servicemen could be called "violence support workers".

So when will NBC begin referring to George Bush as a 'wholesale violence broker' or a 'deposed warlord'?

Another useful term is "violence consumer". This could include governments, corporations, people who hire a hit man to murder a relative for an inheritance, people who have political workers kidnapped, or people who watch violent movies or play violent video games. The amount of violence consumed varies, and it may be first-hand or second-hand, for fun, profit, or just out of psychologicall weirdness, we need to call violence production and consumption by their right names.

If we group together the occupations producing, promoting, consuming, litigating, and mitigating violent activity, we force ourselves to notice the economic and cultural ripple effect of violence. The amount of economic activity bound up with violence is staggering. But consider the occupational opposite of violence workers, "peace workers". How few of them there are. Consider the job prospects of peace workers such as Headstart teachers, how few of our tax dollars go to support them, how their experience-based wisdom is frozen out of policy discourse.

Confucius said calling things by their right names is the beginning of wisdom. So when will NBC begin referring to George Bush as a "wholesale violence broker" or a "deposed warlord"?

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Contents this page were published in the November/December, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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