beneath the surface and behind the scenes of the killings

The fact that there actually exists an American school where the  mascot is a bullet, says a lot about  the society. A society that sees every problem  as one that guns can resolve.  A society whose media gives its own dead children names and faces  but ignores the children it is killing and  denying a decent life, all  around the world.  Even children who are yet to be born  . Children like the ones  in  Fallujah. Children who will be born deformed and cancer ridden - courtesy the chemicals  and radiation from  American weapons of mass destruction .


The United States is the number one supplier of weapons on the planet, its military the world’s largest employer.  Violence has become America’s major export to the world and we have reaped the financial rewards.  The only problem is we’re addicted to the drug we’re peddling beyond our borders.  The addiction passes on to the next generation through the discursive bloodstream and into the collective womb of culture.  





The most warlike nation with the least number of people ever having felt the terrible impact of war, America entertains itself with killing.  Our sports feel like combat, while the fantasies of combat we consume look like sport.  The mascot of the school district where I teach in rural Pennsylvania is a bullet.  Not a bulldog or huskie or owl or canary.  A bullet—the same thing that killed twenty-six people in another school on Friday.




So watch Obama weep as he proclaims: “Our hearts are broken today. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them…” Then ask yourself why he doesn’t weep for the children who die at his orders from drone attacks in Pakistan—eight times the number of children horribly murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Why are we surprised when the violence we wreak on the rest of the world should plant its poison seeds in the hearts of our children, turning them into murderers of children?  If this tragedy means anything, it’s that America must confront its addiction to violence, to entertainments that equate manhood with killing, and to an entire political and economic system that privileges war-making over the future—and the precious lives—of our own children.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/americas-addiction-to-violence/

There are 192 million firearms owned by Americans, more than any other society in the world. Our rate of death from firearms is three times that of France and Canada, fourteen times greater than Ireland, and two hundred and fifty times greater than Japan, where firearms are aggressively controlled.

The U.S. has more prisoners, per capita, than any country on earth—three times more than Cuba, seven times more than Germany—and, indeed, we house twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world.

Since World War II, the United States engaged in over fifty military operations abroad killing some four million people (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, the list goes on). If you add in to that total massacres by proxies and surrogates, the number flirts with five million (Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, and elsewhere).

We are the only country in the world seemingly perpetually at war. In 2011-2012 alone, the United States was killing people in nine different countries: Iraq and Afghanistan with troops, Libya with rockets, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen with drones, Honduras with raids against drug cartels, the Philippines with air support against insurgents, and most recently in Kenya as 150 Special forces started their operations. No other country in the world can boast of so many military involvements.

And, who knows, we might even take it one step further and retreat from our aspirations of empire and global hegemony, close down our military operations, and bring our vast armies and armadas home —over 400,000 Americans at last count stationed in almost 1,000 overseas military bases.

Russia has ten overseas military bases. China none.

So much room to grow!

Imagine our progressive President, instead of limiting his compassion to the shedding of a tear at a press conference, actually proposed comprehensive and revolutionary changes and legislation that focused not on the symptoms but, at long last, finally started to address the disease itself.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/behind-the-connecticut-massacre/

Remember the 20 children who died in Newton Connecticut.

Remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from Israeli bombardments.

Remember the 168 children who have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006.

Remember the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6 months of this year.

Remember the 400 other children in the US under the age of 15 who die from gunshot wounds each year.

Remember the 921 children killed by US air strikes against insurgents in Iraq.

Remember the 1,770 US children who die each year from child abuse and maltreatment.

Remember the 16,000 children who die each day around the world from hunger.

These tragedies must end.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/remember-all-the-children-mr-president/