Violence: An American Tradition

Every time some "law abiding citizen" exercises his 2^nd Amendment right of purchasing a gun and goes ape-shit mowing down innocent people, as happened in Tucson Saturday morning, we Americans shake our heads and express shock over such violent actions. Then we go through the process of "making sense of this tragedy."

Yes, President Obama's words Wednesday night at the University of Arizona were stirring, brilliant, and no doubt helped in a small way heal the wounds of those most affected by the shootings, but none of us should have been shocked by the mass killings the other day because, sad to say, we are a sick, violent culture. We were founded on violence and we embrace violence. The words of our National Anthem include the red glare of rockets and the bursting of bombs. We take pride in our hard-ass attitude. "Don't mess with the U.S. !"

Just look at our beginnings. We are a country founded by slave owners, and as people held in servitude would have been happy to tell you, their owners weren't afraid to use violence to keep them in line. Rebellious workers were repeatedly whipped and those who dared run away were hunted down and hanged. And after slavery was abolished, "freed" slaves lived in terror, trying to stay one step ahead of those fine Christians known as the Ku Klux Klan.

We are a country that believed "Manifest Destiny" gave us the right to move westward, taking land from Mexico and slaughtering millions of Native Americans so that we could live free on their soil. And those Indians who were fortunate enough to survive were virtually driven from the continent, sent off to live in tiny reservations as second-class citizens on the very land they once called home.

We are a country that in our 240 years of existence has engaged in ten major wars (and a whole bunch of "little" ones) and not a single generation of Americans has lived and died without our soldiers fighting somewhere on this planet during their lifetimes. Though exact numbers will never be known, estimates lie somewhere between one and two million of the number of Americans killed in armed conflict. That doesn't even take into account the millions we have killed in the name of freedom. Hell, in August of 1945, we snuffed out nearly 250,000 Japanese lives in a period of only four days, and don't forget the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by our cute, little real-life video game of "shock and awe."

We are a country that, for all its claims of decency and compassion, still employs the death penalty-a practice long ago abandoned by our formerly brutal European allies. Even France-a country once so sick it created a truly efficient death machine known as the guillotine-outlawed capital punishment 30 years ago. But the good old U.S. of A. stands side-by-side with such like-minded friends as Iraq , Iran , Afghanistan , Pakistan , China , North Korea , Lebanon , Libya , and the Sudan as practitioners of this ancient form of "justice."

We are a country where one of the richest and most powerful Washington lobbies is the National Rifle Association-an organization populated by men with small penises and even smaller minds devoted not only to preserving their supposed right to own firearms, but also to fighting every piece of legislation that might require gun owners to use safety locks so their kids don't accidentally blow their heads off. And god forbid if assault weapons and "cop-killer" bullets should be outlawed.

We are a country thoroughly fascinated and entertained by violence. It is in our movies, TV shows, music, and video games. Our number one sport-one that has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry-features steroid-infested behemoths crashing into one another often resulting in concussed brains and broken body parts. True, these men choose to engage in this dangerous occupation, but it's the joy we Americans derive from watching the carnage that should be disturbing. But we love it! Football is the All-American game.

We are a country that allows a forum for overfed blowhards like The Human Bowel Movement, Rush Limbaugh, to spread their carefully marketed brand of bullshit geared towards riling the basest emotions of the dumbest Americans. (Warning: if you call yourself a "ditto-head," you might be an idiot.) No one should question Limbaugh's right to be a public ass-wipe, but we indeed should question a culture that makes him, Glenn Beck, et al. among the most listened to voices and richest people in America . If no one was buying what Limbaugh is selling, he'd be as bad off as the people he seems to detest so much.

Yes, we can be shocked and we can talk about healing. We can shake our heads and try to make sense of terrible acts of violence. But it will never get better because it is what we are. It's in our history, it's in our culture, and it's in our genes.

It's an American tradition.

References:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war