Fast forward six decades and the many wars fought around the world during that period, to 1984. It was another seminal period in the history of the United States. The year 1984 was a turning point in our culture. It was the beginning of the economic and intellectual fraud of regressive taxation and supply side economics.
In 1984, Peter Ueberoth turned a profit on the L.A. Olympics, for the first time in the history of the amateur event. A decade later, the Olympics were fully professional. In 1984, states began experimenting with legalized gambling. Seventeen states had lotteries, two had casinos and no states allowed video poker or gaming on native lands.
A decade later, more people visited legal casinos than attended symphony concerts, Broadway shows, or read literature. In 1984, capital started to cross national boundaries and most corporations still dreaded debt-heavy balance sheets. A decade later, transnational capital drove the U.S. economy, and LBOs financed with junk bonds soared and the more companies laid off long term workers, the more their corporate stocks seemed to rise.
In 1984, a surge in the deinstitutionalized, homeless vagrants, prompted governments to set up special shelters, but a decade later citing "compassion fatigue" communities were evicting vagrants from public areas and building prisons at the fastest rate in history.
In 1984, Hollywood had just invented the tech-enhanced violent action movie and a decade later the typical child had seen 10,000 acts of TV mayhem by the age of 18. Today, violent on line video games promoting the sadism of violence and murder are ubiquitous. Doing better and feeling worse, has become part of our culture's new declinism.
We, of course do not condone violence, but while we must condemn violence, we must also point out what produced it. Generally, it is not extremists but extreme conditions. We must ask, who lit the match, but we must also discern why there was a fuse attached to the powder keg. Violence needs redefinition. It should mean anything that violates human dignity and human rights.
Exploitation is the essence of violence, and its perpetrators can engage in it without ever drawing a knife or squeezing a trigger. After the exploitation becomes public, the populace tends to be repelled by the bloodshed, rather than the injustice producing it. The media is of little help, with its tendency to sensationalize rather than analyze. It makes Americans' and our innocent children, inmates in the prison houses of their own spirits.
There's a look in the eyes of our children, that pleads why, why are we subjected to this. It's a look of despair and discomfort, that as parents we can no longer resist. The hopes of youth and the memories and requirements of old age are the polarities of our population.
It was 54 years ago this April and June, that America lost two of its best progressive advocates for peace, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.
We have become a lost generation since their assassinations and the progressive President Kennedy in November 1963.
We have become captured by war mongering, lobbied representatives, brazenly purchased by the National Rifle Association (NRA). and the Military-Congressional-Industrial Complex, that President Eisenhower presciently warned of us, who have failed to give mankind a peaceful society that we were promised as our American heritage.
Our cries for peace have been stymied but not silenced. The cries of the people and now tragically our children continue.
Just like our own teenage and college anti-war movements in the 60's and 70's, we must now vigorously join our children in their existential plea to end violence and war, and bring an enduring peace.
We must never compromise, and never forget our born duty. We must systematically reject the regressive culture that has been inflicted on us, and the evil mayhem it has created.
"The penalty good men pay for not being active in politics and effecting change, is to be governed by men worse than themselves."
-Plato
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