The “Still In Love” music video for the band Five A.M. is a symbolic representation of our reality. Daily we are all confronted with boundless images, thoughts, and paradigms of violence and domination. We, like the characters, all live in the same overwhelming world and have choices in how to interact with each other as a result.

Like Eddie, many of us find the reality of violence not only burdens us as we carry this perspective chained upon our being, but it also stifles our movement like roving walls of vision and sound in every direction we look. Others of us stay behind doors, perhaps scared or just confused, like the woman who comes out to help him up after he has been beaten and robbed and we wait our turn to do some similar act of kindness when it finds our door.

Still many of us end up being the persons walking by with umbrellas, unaware those nearly struck down in the streets or robbed in alleyways, if we are not so ingrained that we do the robbing or the driving. The point is that we have the choices to be anyone in this situation. First, perhaps, is becoming aware of the constant barrage of noise.

Violence is everywhere. It has been for centuries, and largely because we don’t know there is another way. There is, and for each of us it manifests in different ways. Awareness becomes the first step in a renewed life journey. Around us is violence, we can get past it and through it. The transformation is not in joining that violence, nor is it in cowering from it.

Pace e Bene believes that violence can be confronted and triumphed over. When the fires burn away, and the firefighters are confused, what is left seems to be a burnt television. A television which had previously carried only visions of violence. Violence, however, has ended if we choose to see the third way.

Shown in the final shot, the TV is renewed, resurrected even. The next generation, the girl, is left without the burden of violence, she carries on her screen the images of peace. The one kind act the troubled Eddie was afforded is the only thing left on his TV. That one kindness is what lasts. Finding our ways, from the way we think to the activities we choose to support to who we associate with and how we talk, are initial steps in removing the images of violence from the images of our lives we leave behind. Pace e Bene exists for the very reason of changing the paradigms from bereavement to benevolence.