15 December 2012

Our Culture of Fear, War and Division


 Twenty-two children were stabbed in a violent knife attack by a man in China. The difference is no child was killed in the knife attack. This isn't a gun control issue in the 'strictest' sense. It is a culture of violence and divisiveness we have here in the US. There is not necessarily a correlation between gun ownership and gun violence. Switzerland has 44 weapons per 100 citizens...with few acts of gun violence. There is a culture of numbness in this country. Would we be mourning and weeping the loss of the 20 children who were killed by a drone attack in Pakistan? What about the troop in Afghanistan who went berserk and snuck away in the night from his base to murder the children, women and old men in the small village near the base? Yes, it gets media attention...for a moment. But we do not mourn, not as a nation. We do not become fixated. Connecticut has some of the strictest gun control measures in the nation...yet that did not stop this violence. I suspect that our culture is to blame...the culture of violent video games...the culture of testosterone filled movies and competition aimed at and for children and adolescent mentalities...the culture of bullying and power over others in all aspects of our political and 'civil' discourse.... This is all so complicated that we cannot discuss it as one singular issue.

We live in a constant state of fear and 'war for peace'...we militarize and weaponize the world...we mourn our losses and yet so many peoples suffer losses because of our actions.

An example...from personal experience. I mourn the loss of the 58,000 US KIAs in our war in VietNam, we built a wall to remember...but I have nightmares and never forget the 3 to 5 million people we killed in SE Asia...there is also a wall we put up, collectively, to conveniently ignore those losses.

"Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die."

Teach your children well...and make good decisions for them and for yourselves. Teach by doing. The best political statement you or I can make is how we live our lives

2 comments:

Heather Jefferies said...

DEEP breath. Thank you for saying it because nobody else has although given where I live, it's a pressure cooker right now and it would be good for the media and the speculation to go away for a little while so that we can lick our wounds in peace I think. But there is this unsaid business.

As I was driving home as sanely as possible on Friday afternoon in an attempt to meet my daughter's bus (social media in middle school, no way they didn't know), I was thinking, here we go again with the uproar over gun control and he might very well have walked in with a couple of pipe bombs and achieved the same or similar results and we aren't going to look at this because we're going to be too busy yelling and screaming about what *isn't* the problem.

And I'm going to explain to my 12 year old that we aren't special or necessarily uniquie either. Somehow, I'm going to explain that without making it less than it is or blowing it out of proportion. I know, it's some sort of heresy, right?

lostinthewoods said...

The root word of discipline is disciple...our actions speak much louder than our words ever will...the best political statement we can make is how we live our lives, individually, as family, as community, as a nation...as the world...

Perhaps "The Great Awakening" is upon us...it just takes realizing that humanity has cancer.

We can heal.

As I sit staring out of the window in the woods, birds flutter by...Veterans' Day 2023

 With wars and conflicts raging in multiple locations, I'm living in relative peace now.   I went to the Wikipedia page to see how many ...