Booman wrote in his recent article Smug In Our Self-Rightousness:
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our cities. Because everything flows from that.
No, Booman. You are mistaken. What we really “need to do” is to stop the violence of our military. Stop that, bring the troops home, apply the trillions of dollars now spent on useless, self-perpetuating wars to the rebuilding of our social and physical infrastructures and the violence in our inner cities would disappear within a generation. These violent youths of whom you speak? They have been driven insane by despair. They wake up one day at around 10 years of age and see no future for themselves. Their schools are mostly nothing but holding cells for potential shitworkers until they get old enough to work. Why do you think that kids of all races who are not living in poverty or have been otherwise shielded to some appreciable degree from utter despair are not so violent? Who would write these sentences?
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our suburbs. Because everything flows from that.
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our rural areas. Because everything flows from that.
No one would write them. There is certainly “violence” in our non-urban areas…there are always people who are genetically hard-wired towards violence…but it is only highly compacted, concentrated poverty that produces the kind of “Clockwork Orange” level of violence that we are seeing now. Once one gives up all hope of a moderately good life a kind of insanity sets in, and after that it’s all downhill. How to change this? Give people some hope. Some real hope. Give them a good education. Start rebuilding our manufacturing capabilities so that there is work for relatively ungifted people. Rebuilding our own physical infrastructure on an FDR/Works Project level would mean employment for millions and millions of people. Real work, not clerking in a chain drugstore somewhere. Necessary and valuable work as well. I mean…when the U.S. was functioning fairly efficiently, when the twin curses of unemployment and inflation were not so rampant as they are now, all of the people working and providing for their families were not necessarily geniuses, to say the least. They were just average folks. For a “just average” middle class kid in a fairly well functioning suburban or rural school system…again, of any race…the chances of getting an education that will allow him or her to work and have a moderately successful life are still quite high. Not as high as they were when this country was at its peak(s) of prosperity, but still pretty good. Now look at “just average” inner city ghetto kids. What are their chances of living a life that could rationally be called successful? Much, much lower. Add to that the undeniable fact that this society has generally used darker skin color as a marker for people to be condemned to the worst kinds of jobs if they do manage to survive relatively sane through adolescence and you have a recipe for violence. When is this situation going to end, Booman? When? Is your “peace president” ending the economic imperialist wars that have been fought in the name of American exceptionalism for a century or more? No, he isn’t; he is just making the war machine more technologically efficient. Is the huge financial drain on the country that is caused by a military/intelligence system that is quite obviously out of control lessening in any way? No, it is not. Instead, effective whistle blowers are hounded into surrender, exile or death and the media machine continues to paint its very successful picture of the necessity for continued military/intelligence buildup in the name of “security.”
Do you know who said these words?
Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
Hermann Goering said them.
Do the massive, technologically enabled surveillance state and its fevered defense by your president and his cohorts differ in any way from what was going on in Goering’s Nazi Germany? Only in the means that are used to wage the desired wars, Booman. Terror is terror whether it’s brought by V2 rockets or Predator drones, and surveillance is surveillance whether it is done by jackbooted Gestapo or glasses-wearing techies. Bet on it.
This situation has to stop before any improvement in inner city violence will be seen. Ban the guns that enable that violence? How’s that worked out over the preceding 50 years or so? Banning guns doesn’t work. Why? There are already millions and millions of them out there, and short of rounding up every American, confining them all to camps of some sort and then methodically searching the entire country for weapons…ludicrous on the face of it…guns will still be easily available to anyone who really wants one. But change the way the system works for the people who are engaging in that violence? One generation of real change would be all that was needed. And your president is not doing what is needed to produce that kind of change. What’s that you say? His hands are tied because the bad guys still hold a great deal of power? I say bullshit. He is owned by the forces that got him elected…the same forces who own “the bad guys,” Booman. Deal wid it.
Is it possible for someone…or better, some group of people…to be elected here who refuse to be owned by the Permanent War Government? I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t going to happen if well-meaning people like most of those on this site continue to buy into the line of political guff presently being handed out by the media. We must break the fix, Booman, and it ain’t gonna happen by rooting for the home teams. They are both in on it.
There is only one way out of this, and that is to oppose the aggressive military stance that has dominated this nation since the early 1950s. We are still fighting the Dulles’s wars only on other fronts, and we are losing. Supporting a faux “Peace President” isn’t going to get it done, it’s just going to paint another pretty picture over the awful horror of what we are rapidly becoming…the true face of terror for most of the world. Can opposition to this system win here? I don’t know, but not opposing it is a sure loss. Gotta start somewhere.
Where are you going to start, Booman?
And…when?
The clock’s a’ticking and the chickens are already in flight.
When, Booman?
When?
AG
