we are living in a paradoxical situation. This is refugee year when the essence of such a cause should be peace and tolerance, and yet we are also living in the age of violence. It is all around us. We have it thrust at us from the screens of our television sets, we read about it in the paper-back novels and children’s comics abound with it, we are raised on a philosophy of respect for the man of action and a thinly-veiled contempt for the man of peace (or the coward, depending on how you look at it).
The heroes of our comic stories are the six foot six mountains of muscle and bone, with limited vocabularies and handy left hooks. We hold on to an unwritten admiration for the man who will hit out in the face of opposition; indeed the bigger the opponent tackled, the greater is the hidden virtue of the action, and it is a way of life which we are daily handing on to our children.