The Violence of Avoidance

When doing nothing produces real harm

Doing nothing feels safe.

It feels restrained, responsible, and above the fray. It avoids escalation and the risk of an incorrect choice.

But harm does not wait just because decision-makers do.

We often define violence as something active. A blow struck. Blood spilled. Yet there is another form of violence that is quieter and more socially acceptable. It occurs when foreseeable harm is allowed to proceed because intervening would be politically costly. It occurs when delay is framed as prudence, and prudence becomes permission.

Avoidance does not merely store pressure. It redistributes harm.

Consider what happens when false and vague claims of widespread election fraud are introduced into the public discourse. Courts dismiss them, evidence fails to materialize, and investigations produce little to substantiate them. Yet instead of confronting those claims decisively as baseless, many leaders treat them as grievances to be accommodated in the name of “restoring confidence.” The result is legislation framed as election integrity, imposing new documentation requirements that fall unevenly across the electorate.

The harm here is real. It is predictable exclusion. Citizens who lack ready access to specific forms of identification or documentation – often the poor, women whose names have changed, people in unstable housing – face new barriers to participation. The injury is not dramatic and visceral. It is procedural.

And it is real.

Or consider the ongoing weakening of public health and regulatory capacity. Systems that were visibly strained in recent years are not being reinforced. Established scientific guidance sidelined, staffing gaps widen, and the ability to detect the next threat is diminished. Those with power to defend these institutions either justify the reductions or decline to resist them forcefully. The consequences are not immediate headlines. They are slower outbreak detection, weaker responses to emerging threats, and increased vulnerability when the next crisis arrives.

None of this is unforeseen. The risks are documented. The warnings are public. The potential costs are known. What is missing is not information, but decision.

Violence is not only what is done. It is also what is allowed.

When preventable harm is permitted to continue because acting would be uncomfortable, reputationally risky, or politically divisive, the burden does not disappear. It shifts. It falls on those with the least ability to absorb it. It embeds itself in the next emergency. It compounds over time.

Avoidance protects comfort. It protects position and the hope that normalcy will return if we can just endure the current disruption. But waiting is not neutral when systems are being actively reshaped. Waiting becomes participation in whatever direction events are already moving.

At some point, continued silence stops looking like caution and begins to look like alignment. Whether motivated by agreement, fear, calculation, or fatigue, the refusal to intervene produces the same result.

Harm does not wait for leaders to feel comfortable.

The erosion of voting access through legislation built on unsubstantiated claims, the weakening of institutions designed to detect and mitigate public health threats, the erosion of guardrails that once constrained the abuse of power. These are not mysteries. They are the outcomes of decisions not to decide. Authority left unused. Stepping aside instead of stepping up.

The violence of avoidance is cumulative. It rarely arrives as spectacle. It appears as smaller circles of participation, slower institutional response, and preventable crises that feel inevitable only because they were permitted to grow out of hand.

Refusing to stop preventable harm does not make one neutral.

It makes one part of the outcome.

The opposite of avoidance is not aggression. It is responsibility.

Responsibility means recognizing that inaction carries consequences. It means accepting that silence can enable injury. It means choosing to prevent harm, even when doing so carries immediate cost.

Doing nothing feels safe.

Until the damage arrives.

And when it does, it rarely arrives evenly.