In Albuquerque we’ve become accustomed to hearing about another police shooting in which an unarmed person is killed. In the past several years we’ve had two dozen of these, with 17 fatalities. This past week our city saw two civilian shootings, each of them resulting in high-speed chases and terrorizing neighborhoods for several hours. It feels as if we are trying to catch up with notoriously violent cities such as Chicago or Los Angeles.
Nationally, it remains shocking, but no longer unexpected or unusual, to hear about a lone man, deranged (and almost always a man), shooting up a school, workplace, or thoroughfare. Each incident fuels renewed discussion of our firearms policies. When the lives of a large number of small children are snuffed out, or a congresswoman barely survives, the discussion may last a little longer than usual. To date, however, no major change in policy has been possible.
Such incidents also encourage citizenry to focus on the terrible lack of attention to the needs of the mentally ill, and allow the National Rifle Association and other organizations that want to defend our right to carry arms at any cost to shift the conversation away from the ownership of battlefield-style weaponry to ways of determining a person’s mental fitness to own and use a gun. As if both issues were not vitally important.
Ours is a nation built on violence. This is historically true, but today it is more overt, less hidden, more in your face. We decry the lives lost, especially the lives of innocent children, even as many of us applaud the violent acts perpetrated by our government and corporate leaders at every level. The US wages war in a number of countries, and our president is awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Our military and CIA bomb wedding parties and other civilian gatherings with the use of drones remotely controlled by specialists half a world away. Once in a while a drone strike kills an Al Qaeda or Taliban enemy.
The United States has waged illegal war, tortured in offshore prisons, and held captives for years without trial. No one but a few low-level scapegoats have been punished for these flagrant human rights violations. The violence continues, unabated. Corporations wage their own sort of violence by bundling bad loans, downsizing factories, cutting salaries and benefits in order to maximize profits, and deceiving the general public as to their strategies. Of late, some members of Congress have gone even further: furloughing federal employees to make a crass political point. None of these exploitative actions are called crimes. Some aren’t even illegal. However, they constitute economic violence that can be almost as deathly as that inflicted by brutality and war.
There is no limit to the varieties and degrees of violence perpetrated by those in whom the American people place their trust.
We live in a time when all these modalities of violence become ever more accepted. They are the new status quo. Despite the occasional brave voice raised against this criminality, it has become the new normal. And today’s treatment of whistleblowers has become yet another violent response. Once those who exposed wrongdoing were respected, even listened to. Now they are imprisoned or worse.
With the degree of “official” violence rapidly reaching a point of no return, it should not surprise us that our youth are imitating their elders. The plethora of violent video games, song lyrics, action thrillers and the like are but a pale simulation of the violence perpetrated and sanctioned at the top.
Truly, this is all of a piece. It is difficult to imagine the job of a school teacher charged with imbuing values of honesty, tolerance, mediation, and other civilized ethical standards to students who, in their everyday lives, see the status achieved by gang leaders and the honors bestowed upon killers.
I believe we need to look at violence—all violence—as a new category of human behavior, and work together to eradicate it from our culture.
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