WEANED ON SLAUGHTER
Take a good look at all those video games given to kids for Christmas. Take a look at all the movies coming out of Hollywood during the last year. Now tell me just what percentage of these games and movies do not involve guns; and blasters, bombs, missiles all delivered to destroy. Our kids, and especially boys, do not take in a taste for murderous violence with their mothers' milk. They wait a few years until they are old enough to watch movies and play electronic games. Is this true of all cultures?
America was born out of violence, out of the forcible theft of land from the people already living on it. The west, consequently, was "won". It was the loot appropriated by the victors. Now in a land of SUVs and McMansions, flat screens and hospitals we must still protect ourselves. Canada, after all, might invade any minute, not to mention Cuba. Let's ratchet up the national debt so that we can throw more money at the military-industrial complex. Is all of this not pure madness? Is the problem of “mental illness” proper to individuals or to a culture as a whole? Is it any surprise that some of our boys and young men, so intimate with violence in their formation, in their very amusements and games, and accustomed to seeing this violence ratified by a warlike and barbarous government, take up arms and then attack their fellows with such ease? Their actions evolve not only from a lifetime of moral neglect but from a subliminal training supplied by the agents of blind greed and a government gone mad.