When we look at problems in our homes, our neighborhoods, or the world, we often ask ourselves: who’s to blame?

Sometimes we blame ourselves and then feel paralyzed by guilt. No solution there. Sometimes we look for scapegoats to blame: the politicians, the government, illegal immigrants, gays and lesbians. Hitler tried that by blaming the Jews. We tried that by blaming the communists. That didn’t work either. How do we get accountability without getting into useless blaming?

Maybe we can learn something from the history of surgery. In the 1800s, a British surgeon, Joseph Lister, urged his fellow surgeons to wash their hands before every operation. This, he said, would help prevent the post-operative infections that killed many of their patients.

At first the surgeons just laughed. They said, in effect, “Our hands are not the problem. Our hands are the solution. If a patient dies, it’s not our fault.” Then they saw how surgeons who washed lost fewer patients. And gradually, more and more surgeons began to wash their hands. A problem was solved without blame.

Let’s take that lesson and apply it to another problem: the growth of violence all around us and the infectious belief that violence works as a solution to our problems.

We worry about violence on our streets and in our homes. The fact is that America has a history of belief in violence. From Waco to Iraq to Panama to Libya, to Lebanon, to Grenada, to Nicaragua and El Salvador, we ourselves have seen our own government choose violent intervention as the preferred solution. This violence seems acceptable to all but a few of us.

It seems that violence is indeed as American as apple pie. We feature it in children’s cartoons, in our TV and movie fare, and in war toys at Christmas. Have any of us seen a western or action film where the story’s resolution came without the help of a gun?

Of course, all these uses of violence, whether fictional or real, are justified as self-defense against evil forces and evil persons. We make ourselves the “good guys” and blame the others as the “bad guys.”

The problem is that, like germs on a surgeon’s hands, the tendencies toward violence are present to all of us.

So for us to deal with the roots of violence on our streets and in our neighborhoods, we must first deal with our own beliefs about violence.

Like the surgeons, we must look to our own hands, our own hearts and minds for the roots of violence.

And on a broader level, we must look to the collective beliefs in violence manifest in the actions of our local, state and federal governments.

We can do this without guilt or blame. We can do this by converting from our beliefs in violence. This is hard, but Jesus, Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King showed us the way.

Tom Keene is a San Antonio poet-activist and a retired professor of religious studies at Our Lady of the Lake University. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .