Violence has dominated the media in this country since before we violently broke away from our mother country England. Violence is daily brought into every American home through televised news and prime time programming. Violence is what drives moviegoers to part with ten bucks to see the latest R-rated block buster.
Children practice violence on the school playground, our children are killing each other and their parents, their parents are killing their children, their parents are killing each other, drugs are peddled openly on our city streets under the threat of violence.
We are a violent nation.
Presidents have been assassinated, judges have been murdered, threats are reported against our political leadership weekly.
The Iraq and Afghan war’s have created a level of international terrorism so great that has become a threat to the security of us all.
The recent tragedy in Tucson, Arizona has brought the nation’s attention on the state of our collective mental health and, once again, on our gun laws.
Our steady erosion of values, our alarming lack of respect for human life, our lust for more money and power have placed the value of human life a distant second or even third place. These are the true root issues of violence that need to be addressed. We have created a division in this country between those people in power promising they will bring change to our once proud but now failing American way of life and those who are struggling to survive the increasing cost of everything, the loss of our jobs to foreign countries, and the realization that our American dream is being sold wholesale to illegal immigrants.
Homeland Security – working under orders to protect us from terrorism - thinks nothing of stripping ‘all’ us of our dignity through invasive airport searches in the name of political correctness. Every level of law enforcement has adopted the private policy that ‘everyone is guilty until proven innocent’ despite their public policy that the opposite is in effect.
Judicial ‘discretion’ allows such widely diverse sentences that prejudice seems to rule over the Constitutionally given “equal justice for all”.
Homegrown terrorism is being narrowly applied to Muslims in a short-sighted attempt to bolster control over the American people. It cannot be denied that “radicalization is taking place in America”, to quote North Carolina Representative Sue Myrick, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. But radicalism is something we have been practicing in America long before Islam ever stepped foot on our shores. It exists and thrives in many forms: domestic violence, road rage, rape, child predation, workplace violence.
The continued existence of these horrible actions we take against our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters reflects our leaders' inability to make honest assessments about the true threats to America's security. The causes of terrorism leads to the root causes of violence. Addressing and reducing violence, as well as inequality, on an individual basis is needed to reduce the true security threat to all of us.
The myth of homegrown terrorism as in pertains to Muslims serves the interests of loudmouths on both ends of the ideological spectrum. To the right, the threat of homegrown terrorism helps to perpetuate the notion of a ceaseless, civilization-wide struggle against Islamic extremism. To the left, the prospect of American Muslims taking up jihad fits with the idea that the U.S.'s foreign policy is creating a new generation of terrorists.
We are not doomed to be a violent nation, a better course of action for Americans to take, if we truly want to protect ourselves is to teach methods of anger management, make people feel their voices are not falling on deaf ears, show them how violence only brings about more violence. Show them how violence is selfish and unproductive. Take TSA out of our nations airports. The better way to protect us from outside sources of violence is to increase security on our shores and international ports of entry. Let’s take care of ourselves, not by lumping all of us in with some trumped up terrorist master plan, but by education and putting the welfare and security of the American people us first.
I want to close with this plea from Rodney King of “can’t we all just get along”. It gets laughed at for its naiveté but there still remains a part of each of us that wants this question answered.
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