Violence and US

Like everyone else, I can’t stop thinking about those poor children and their parents in Newtown, and wondering how they will make it through the next days during this season, and then the next years.I doubt they’ll ever heal from such a thing, though hopefully the pain will lesson over time. I have found myself listening to various news programs about the shootings, and received quite a number of emails from friends, as well as postings on my Sarah Lawrence College listserve. Even when I was sitting in front of the TV feeling a sense of shock, I was surprised that none of the newscasters seemed to be talking about the violence inherent in our country since its inception, and how this might affect mentally ill young men steeped in a culture where violence is not only there for all to see, but is often venerated in movies with heroes that kill their way to security. Last year I was appalled to see an advertisement, repeated endlessly, for an x-box game of ‘war’ where the goal for the player, usually a kid, was to shoot as many ‘opponents’ as possible and blow up their buildings, towns, etc. Who these ‘enemies’ were was never defined. Why Friday’s shooter thought little children were his enemies, we will probably never know. But don’t we need to look at the messages we send kids on a daily basis, over the internet, in our games, on television, and in our movie theaters? How about taking on honest look at our history, and how our founding fathers brought slaves to our shores, and treated them thereafter, thinking it fine to own, and whip, other human beings for their supposed transgressions? Or we could look at the genocide we perpetrated on Native Americans for generations, and in many respects, still do. Geronimo Pratt, Leonard Peltier, and just about every ‘reservation’ we’ve ‘given’ them to live on is a part of violence here. Our prison system needs another serious look-see. (Read “The New Jim Crow” for some thoughtful and troubling facts on that horror.) We, as a country, need to acknowledge that we were founded on violence, though it was called ‘manifest destiny’ – whose? I might add – and begin to reshape how we define our behaviors now. Gun control, of course. But folks will always be able to find guns if they want to. How we define our historical and present behavior with one another, truthfully, and then begin to deal with that reality in a new way, seems essential to me, if we are to put a halt to these kinds of tragedies.