Here in the United States, I would argue that the single most influential idea fueling extreme violence is greed. The profit motive. It is every bottom line. It be-trays us in the ignorance, negligence or outright criminality of those who claim global warming is not human-made. Who murder abortion providers but care nothing for starving children. It crouches in our vitiated air and food sources, in our toxic waste dumps and poison pesticides. It is entrenched in a war-mongering mentality that sends tens of thousands to kill and die, and romanticizes and funds ever more high-tech weaponry. It hides in a medical system that privileges insurance and pharmaceutical companies over human health. It struts in a public education system clearly designed to produce generations of pawns in an economy interested in making the 1% richer while the 99% sicken and die. It laughs behind our backs in a financial system that privileges and protects cheating banks. In an economic depression in which college graduates may be lucky to get a job flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. And to the benefit of a street culture in which even minor drug kingpins can make millions. It glorifies every sort of violence until a country that prides itself on loudly proclaimed moral values vies in its disregard for life with any rotten dictatorship.
Greed and hypocrisy. The first is the goal, for so many—from the trendset-ters at the top to the desperate at the bottom who only hope for “freedom from want,” that quintessential American dream. The second is the ever more complicat-ed stuff of which justification is made.
Ours is a nation in which morality is preached and taught and righteously lauded, while every day our leaders devise new ways by which gross immorality may be explained away. Our elected officials—who are not directly elected, and rarely by any democratic measure—justify the decimation of cultures and slaughter of millions with their rhetoric of “defending and spreading democracy.” Those same leaders pretend to fight for the regulation of energy, foodstuffs and every other commodity, while routinely making it easy for those industries to flout regulation. Safety is consistently sacrificed to profit. In the face of dangerous oil exploitation and fracking, emphasis is on “more jobs.” With abundant evidence of criminal behavior in banking, the big guys are deemed “too big to fail” and are bailed out by taxpayers who have no voice or vote.
All the while, everyone from our religious leaders to our teachers and pun-dits talk loudly about truth, honesty, and the sanctity of life. We teach our children that our way is the best way, the most civilized and glorious. “God’s on our side,” as the old Bob Dylan song goes.
Store wrote: “Confronting and undermining the narratives and ideas of ex-tremism must (…) be one of our key tasks. To do this, we must retain the courage of our convictions (…).” But where do we find the courage of our convictions in a world in which the preemptive strike has become acceptable doctrine; enemies are hunted down, condemned and killed without trial in the name of democracy; torture is condoned; and the greatest exploiters are protected while growing numbers of the exploited are left to raise their children in the streets?
Powerful interests possess the economic clout and psychological knowhow by which they are able to convince great numbers of people that black is white, in is out and up is down. We witness this all the time: in BP’s alluring commercials for a vibrant Gulf Coast, in the rapacious adds of pharmaceutical companies urging us to ask our doctors if such and such a medication is “right for us” (while the tally of side effects, including death, run quickly across the bottom of the TV screen), in every political candidate who twists his or her record to make it look human-friendly, and in a public discourse that has changed the meaning of language so that it appears to stand for the very opposite of what it is.
I don’t believe we will be able to turn things around until we can make the connections between all these ways in which the powerful wage war against the powerless. Violence, whether hidden away in the folds of domesticity, unleashed through the invasions of countries whose politics and economies ours hopes to control, or spit from the weapon of a lone gunman in a Colorado movie theater or at a Connecticut elementary school, is but the underbelly of social hypocrisy and disintegration at its most dramatic.
March 26, 2013