Violence in America

“Since her boys were teenagers, she [a mother who had just lost her son to gun violence] had been haunted by the fear that guns might take them. There is a connection, she believes, between the violence that blights America and the country's actions elsewhere. ‘When people see what we're doing in the rest of the world, they think, why not in my neighborhood? The government sets an example of violence and then it gets played out on the streets.’ "

The above quote is from the Guardian Newspaper’s recent article on gun violence in America. The article tells the story of nine young people who found themselves on the wrong end of a hand gun in different cities in America over a 24-hour period. The sentiments of the woman in the above quote, Martine Parraga, greatly mirror my own (see previous entry).America can’t possibly hope to quell violence at home when we export our violent tendencies abroad. While there has been a strong current of violence throughout the history of mankind, the United States has managed to institutionalize that violent sentiment over the last 60 or 70 years, since the end of World War II and the emergence of the US as the sole global superpower. In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned us against the threat of the “military-industrial complex” (see previous entry), which has not only championed the loss of US life through military operations around the globe, but has successfully spread our bellicose tendencies to other governments and regimes. How many US and British soldiers have been killed by al Qaeda using weapons that we sold them in the first place? How are we expected to teach our youth to respect life when countless innocent Iraqi citizens have died at the hands of US and British soldiers? Perhaps Ms. Parrega is right: the violence in our neighborhoods is simply a microcosm for US actions in the global community.

If our government and society began showing some respect for human life abroad, maybe we as Americans could learn to respect each other at home.