In the same week, a kid shot up a public school in Georgia and a second gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump. As usual, people in this highly militaristic society are asking: what is inspiring all this mayhem?
Where Is All This Violence Coming From?
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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It MUST be the “invisible hand” of the commies!!!
It is true, we are a violent peoples.
People leave out a big part of it. Track the schools that the shootings happen in. Many of them are large complexes (thousands of students, students are bused in and out) with substantial poverty. Marjory Stoneman Douglas had over 3,000 students and over a quarter of them were eligible for free or reduced cost lunch. Although Marx isn’t taught in schools, the “alienated student” is in full bloom here.
As a student, you are told when to start your day, where to eat, when to eat, what to study, when to study it, you are tested and tested and tested on material that, mostly has little value in preparing you to make your own way in the world and predicated in a mid-1900s mindset. Your teachers are held to schedules that are timed out to the minute. Although you have a few friends, you only get to spend time with them when the system lets it happen by accident. Nothing in the mechanisms lets you “match” with your buddies. People you despise? People who pick on you, belittle you, harass you? You can’t get away from them. If you say something to the teacher, nothing happens. Well, you get branded a coward or a snitch or something. Then the teacher sighs, tells herself it’s only 28 years to her retirement, and goes back to whatever the hell she was teaching.
As a student, you usually don’t have a house, a car, kids, a job, money of your own, or a skillset. You are stuck there, my friend, with Del and Neal, smack dab in Wichita, and you have no way out. Oh, you also lack the depth of experience to put it all in perspective and cope. And I haven’t even gotten to your family life, which could be a shitstorm of epic proportions.
And don’t forget that most schools have cut their music, art, drama, and other similar programs. (N.B.: I am aware of no school that REQUIRES a student to learn to play a musical instrument. Or join a pottery class. But God help you if you don’t get through Geometry.)
The sports programs, which — and you can look it up — injure and kill comparable numbers of students as are injured or killed by shooters (actually, your pwecious darling is more likely to be injured in a sporting event than shot at school), are never cut.
Now, tie ALL that in with the collapse of the middle class, which has been going on for decades. How many students, sitting in class, slowly going crazy from the boredom and the awfulness, know that there will not be any jobs out there when they graduate? Options? Well, take loans to go to college for four years. Then face the same problem, but at least it’ll be four years down. Or join the military, get PTSD.
The violence that’s cheap and plentiful in our culture is how our system processes our children.
‘We shape our culture by the stories we tell and what we idolize, we become.’
— Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)
My diagnosis: Mass shootings come from a scarcity of hope.
Back in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s we had the Korean War and T.V. coverage of the War in Vietnam, wars in the Middle East and the threat of Cold War turning hot and going nuclear (Bay of Pigs). The police and National guard violently put down civil rights marches and antiwar protest (Kent State). We had Hollywood cowboys shotting it out every night, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Rifleman and long, long list of cowboy, police and military shows with guns. Despite all that happened back in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s Mass Shootings was not an issue, why? I believe people at that time had hope, the incomes of working people where rising, mostly due the work of unions, civil rights and environmental legislation were passed. Science and medicine was making life better, people were living longer, civil rights was slowly moving forward. People had hope, they started families qualified for a mortgage on starter home , paid their medical copays, went on simple vacations and put their children through college.
Now hopes have faded, rents are racing higher and higher, CEO’s that only care about stock prices (Boeing and so many more) are outsourcing or moving jobs to Right To Work States. Automation has replaced many workers and AI threatens many more. Gobal Warming, plastics. species extinction the environment needs help. Medical copays are leading to numerous bankruptcies The 80’s started the push back against the middle class, now a Right-Wing Supreme Court and the Republican Party seems ready to drags us further into a new unjust Gilded Age.
Guns- Fentanyl two sides of despair.