This tragedy follows in the wake of Columbine in Littleton, Colorado, 13 years ago with Harris and Klebold. This fall a man named James Holmes shot up an entire movie theater, also in Denver. A Muslim U.S. Army Major Hasan shot 42 innocent people. The Times Square bomber and thousands of other acts of violence have devolved us into a violent, unsafe and frightening culture.
It's not the individual acts that make us a violent culture. We promote violence on TV with incredibly violent programs like NCIS. Criminal Minds TV show creates horrific and sickening criminal torture and death plots. Springer, Povich, Cunningham and other moronic TV shows celebrate illiteracy, the dregs of society and sheer violence. We create unspeakable brutality via other TV shows. Our movies depict the sickening world of masochists and sadists while movie goers absorb these graphics deep within their minds.
In every town, you may go to a video arcade and watch kids commit murder, mayhem, slaughter and staggering acts of violence--with glee, joy and a sense of victory. All of it mindless, yet potent toward further real life carnage within our society.
Child Abuse in AmericaChildren are suffering from a hidden epidemic of child abuse and neglect. Every year 3.3 million reports of child abuse are made in the United States involving nearly 6 million children. The United States has the worst record in the industrialized nation -- losing five children every day due to abuse-related deaths.(Source: http://www.childhelp.org/pages/statistics )
On our highways, drunk drivers killed 17,000 to as many as 20,000 innocent lives every single year with their weapon of choice--a 4,000-pound missile speeding down the highway at 75 miles per hour drunk or high on drugs--but we refuse to construct drunk-driving laws that would make the crime more prohibitive than the offense. We promote alcoholism via beer commercials sensationalizing the lifestyle of alcohol, replete with beautiful women and fast cars.
Our U.S. Congress reeks of warmongering by starting the Korean War, Vietnam War, Desert Storm War and Iraq War for no valid reason whatsoever. We killed millions of people and destroyed millions of parents, adults and children. Millions! We remain in Afghanistan, long after bin Laden met his death--still killing their people and ours--with no positive result.
Over the decades, our drones and bombs have created hundreds of thousands of "Newtown, Connecticuts" where millions of people have died in the aforementioned countries. We insist on maintaining 450,000 military personnel on 700 bases around the world to showcase our ability to kill anyone whose perspective doesn't match ours.
After the 10-year Vietnam War, over 200,000 of our soldiers became so distraught from their experiences, that they committed suicide. Today, an average of four present and former US soldiers commit suicide daily from their war traumas. Millions more emotionally limp along from drugs, depression, PTSD and alcoholism. Some experts predict another 200,000 U.S. soldiers will commit suicide from their military service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While we war upon other countries for decades, and after Columbine's mass murders, we fail to take care of our own youth such as the young man who just killed 26 innocent human beings. An average of 18 teenagers commit suicide in America every single day of the year, every year, every decade--without pause.
A mind-numbing 15,000 people kill others with their knives and guns annually, year after year, decade after decade. Equally lethal, although self-imposed, smokers of tobacco kill themselves off at 450,000 annually.
Let's talk about men beating wives, girlfriends and lovers:
* There are 1,500 shelters for battered women in the United States. There are 3,800 animal shelters. Cruelty to animals abounds in the USA. (Schneider, 1990).
* Three to four million women in the United States are beaten in their homes each year by their husbands, ex-husbands, or male lovers. ("Women and Violence," Hearings before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Hearing, 101-939, pt. 1, p. 12.)
* One woman is beaten by her husband or partner every 15 seconds in the United States. (Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation.)
Our federal officials have arrested and slammed 37 million kids into jail for smoking a joint in the past 41 years of the "War on Drugs"--while alcohol and booze have killed endless millions--legally.
As our government foments, creates and imposes wars on countries 10,000 miles away, we suffer the cruelty of 14 million jobless Americans, 47.7 million living on food stamps, 1.5 million homeless and 2.3 million Americans subsisting in prisons.
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