The Daily Clarity

The troubling violence in US Society

This guest article rerun , made germane again by the recent Holcaust Museum shooting, was written by contributor Brian Kane. Brian, a long-time blogger,  writes about many things; sometimes about interesting news, articles and other stuff , other times about his life , and sometimes he just likes to get on his soapbox in the original spirit of blogging.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School Massacre. The mainstream media already have their retrospectives, their “where are they now” pieces, and their terribly thoughtful commentaries all put together and ready to bombard us with.

Meanwhile, over the past month and a half a string of mass killings and murder-suicide incidents has taken more than twice as many lives as were lost in Littleton, Colorado that April day. Fourteen people died just as a result of the mass killing in Binghampton, NY two weeks ago and the latest incident over the weekend involved a Maryland man killing his wife and three young children before taking his own life. News coverage of such incidents has become so commonplace that the Maryland story barely registers in the collective consciousness of the media.

Also in the last several weeks, the Department of Homeland Security released a report finding a significant rise in the activity of right-wing extremist groups. Despite receiving criticism for being “inflammatory”, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano justified the need to release the report  before it could be bowdlerized to avoid such criticism because of the urgency of the issue — the growing likelihood that what is random violence on the part of disturbed individuals could snowball into organized violence on the part of disaffected groups united by their self-feeding paranoia and realized by hair-trigger situations.

Our cultural obsession with the potential for terror caused by the mysterious “other” — al Quaeda, Iran, Somali pirates — has rendered us nearly blind to the reality of the terror that we instill from within. The threats from outside remain nebulous at least and utterly imaginary at most, while the possibilities of violence against innocent people from disturbed individuals and groups within our own communities realize themselves with increasing frequency and horrifying regularity. Pundits and historians alike now commonly point to September 11, 2001 as the demarcation point for a new era in American society, yet few would choose April 20, 1999 or it’s almost-exactly corresponding predecessor, April 19, 1995 (the date of the Oklahoma City bombing), for the same milestone, despite the vastly more significant occurrence of violence against ourselves

In a sense, our projection of the source of terror and violence onto whatever handy villain our leaders can provide is little more than an ages-old mechanism for focusing public attention to a political agenda; Americans have obediently changed the locus of their hatred and fear over almost a century from Germans to Japanese to Russians to Muslims as political expedience dictated. Indeed, the transition has been so seamless most of the time, that when the first President Bush needed a new villain, the effort of trying to pick one between Manuel Noriega, Muammar Gaddafi and then ultimately Saddam Hussein was almost comic. But the buffoonish machinations of governments and politicians obscure a much more complicated problem. Our projection of terror onto “the other” is a significant denial of the growing manifestation of terror and violence as commonplace elements of our own society.

For the time being, it is possible to ease the visceral response to events like Columbine or the Binghampton shooting as the acts of people with psychological problems. The regularity of such events, though, speaks to a growing acceptance of the conditions that create those psychological disturbances and even an amplification of them to the point that they result in violent outbursts. Now, we are also told by the very agency created in response to the singular events of 9/11 that we are crossing a threshold from individuals acting out in fear, despair, and paranoia to the organization of groups who share many of the same characteristics. The metamorphosis of terroristic violence from lone gunman to motivated group may only require a very small push, and it is clear that there are people actively hoping to put themselves in the forefront of those groups. It is too easy to look back over the last ten years and see the individual incidents as they have become part of our national life. Ten years hence, how likely will it be that we will be able to begin the retrospective of the list of homegrown terrorist attacks that will form yet a new element of our society?

© Copyright 2009 Brian M. Kane. All rights reserved. The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of The Daily Clarity, and the article is the unique work of  the contributor. We welcome views that are both complimentary or antagonistic to our editorial positions.  The copyright in the work belongs to the contributor, other than the specific rights granted to The Daily Clarity, and any permission for reprint or derivative works need to be directed to the author. Should you wish to contact a Daily Clarity contributing writer, please contact us directly and we will be pleased to pass on your request.