Weaned on Violence

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 does not involve guns; and blasters, bombs, missiles all delivered to destroy some enemy. 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? The NRA smiles to see its interests promoted so early in the lives of its future patrons.

America was born out of violence, out of the forcible theft of land from the people already living on it and battened on the labor of slaves. Now in a land of secure borders and without a real threat from any other nation, we must still protect ourselves. Canada, after all, might invade any minute, not to mention Cuba. Nonetheless we ratchet up the national debt as long as we 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 childish toys, amusements, and games, and accustomed to seeing this violence ratified by a warlike and barbarous government, take up arms and then attack their fellow humans with such ease? Is it a surprise that the thoroughly modern American madman slaughters his own kind as we "prey" on each other "like monsters of the deep?"* The actions of these mass-murderers evolve not only from a lifetime of moral neglect but from a subliminal training supplied by the minions of blind greed and a government gone mad.

*King Lear, IV II. The play best suited for our age.