"... in the aftermath of Newtown [2012], a colleague posted a provocative article on the ISEPP list serve that had originally been published in The Washington Post, 'White Men Have Much To Discuss About Mass Shootings'. The authors' contention is that American white men have apparently overlooked the fact that most mass murders in the U.S. are carried out by other white men. Rather than searching for causes in the persons of crazy people or, after Boston, in immigrants and Muslims, white men need to examine their own culture, their own beliefs, and how these might be contributing to the mayhem."
Little appears to have changed.
I also reference in that article noted historian Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself (2013), who, similarly to Hofstadter, lists the nodal points in the progression of the spread of fear in the country. He begins with the Depression when Americans feared for their own survival as well as that of their government as a democracy; and proceeds through the McCarthyite witch hunts after World War II to the end of the Cold War, 1989-91, when the Berlin Wall was taken down (November, 1989) and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved (December, 1991). It seemed then that we had no mortal enemies and might at long last enjoy the "peace dividend" that the Cold War's end promised. But tell that to the families of the hundreds of unarmed black men killed by U.S. police officers since 1990 (extrapolated from a study conducted by The Guardian [published May 25, 2015], which shows black men being killed at twice the rate of any other U.S. ethnic group -- 6.34 per million persons -- with two-thirds of those men killed while unarmed). And tell that to the families of the hundreds of thousands of Afghanis, Iraquis and Syians killed since late 2001 when we sent the first U.S troops into Afghanistan.
Little appears to have changed. The money and resources we expected to be transferred from the Eisenhower-labeled military-industrial complex to repair the nation and our society, to address and resolve basic contradictions, never materialized. Instead, more wars and the steady and ever-increasing occurrence of mass murders, an estimated one per day since the Newtown shootings, culminating in the Planned Parenthood and San Bernardino rampages. Which is why we won't find the proverbial "needle in the haystack" and identify the next shooter before he shoots. Which is why no one suspected Sayed Farook of being capable of doing what he did, this apparently assimilated Pakistani-American, U.S.-college educated, recently married, with a 6-month-old daughter. The more violence that takes place, the more guns that are bought, the lower the threshold for still another shooter.
Are there any remedies for the foregoing? Can anything be done to head off what seems to be the inevitable, i.e., more mass killings? My watchword is always resist -- resist the hatred directed towards "the other". Resist marginalizing and scapegoating the vulnerable; resist guns as a means to ward off fear and paranoia. Struggle to build a grass-roots, up-from-the-bottom, boots-in-the-streets political movement. Restore our cultural sea to health.
The other night, my wife and I were discussing these very same issues with friends over dinner, specifically what to do in the face of the mass murders and the hate and paranoia that were both their cause and consequence. We shifted to a local issue, the proposed warehousing of toxic railcars on unused tracks near the town where our little dinner party was taking place. These were the very same railcars used to carry the oil extracted from Alberta's tar sands around the country's periphery, through New York state, for one, to the crude-oil refineries in Louisiana and Texas. Local residents were alarmed at this possibility, which suggested to me an opportunity to rally people around a common cause and oppose the risk to which they were being put by a railroad corporation indifferent to that risk, aided and abetted by an equally indifferent Federal Railroad Administration.
Fortunately for the town and nearby communities, the proposal was scrapped when no other railroad companies expressed interest and it became apparent there was no money to be made. That near miss notwithstanding, these are the sorts of issues that can be used to forge communitarian solidarity, a long-lost feature of our very divided society.
Part II -- Resistance:
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