But who are "the killers in our midst", whose killing is basic to engendering the idea that it can be good to kill?
Who are the killers in our midst who set the tone for righteous preemptive killing in the name of self-protection and security?
Who are the killers in our midst who commanded the butchery of hundreds - mostly women and children - in just the first days of "Operation Iraqi Freedom"?
Anyone who watched PBS's Bill Moyer's "Buying the War", April 26, 2007, could recognize the prime killers in our midst. Under an 'acceptable' theme of journalistic failure, a conglomerate media - corporate governance conspiracy to commit mass murder was documented in detail, and the methods of deception used were reviewed in depth.
In the early spring of 2003, watching TV-casts of that beautiful pyrotechnical display during the night-time bombing of Baghdad, viewers noticed the great amount of satisfaction, even some glee, on the part of news commentators describing how modern and pin-point accurate were the guided missiles and bombs which were lighting up the cities' sky line. Our severely mentally ill viewers bearing psychotic grudges would have felt the same as the rest of us, a vicarious sense of power in 'letting go' of all that ammunition on its target city.
Do not our world prestigious officially elected leaders and their prime time anchor cohorts, defending, even glorifying mass homicide, not set an terrific example for undermining our natural feeling of brotherly love, and a rationalizing away of the Fifth Commandment. (Even though Moses is said to have ordered the death of the male children and non-virgin women captives in Numbers, 31, 17-18, many of us still would like to pretend to hold the lives of our fellow human beings as just as dear to us as are our own lives.)
Who are the most lethal killers in our midst? Certainly not the handful of poor paranoid souls caught in painful psychotic emotions, driven to kill those, who they, in their insanity, regarded as their in-school social persecutors. But these less than a hundred school victims over decades, as horrible and close to home as they are, are only enough to make for one riveting prime time documentary.
No, the monstrously lethal killers in our midst are those who still brag about how they killed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. They are the veteran politicians who parade as the 'good guys', no matter who and how many they killed in whatever little third world nation. And the greatest killers in our midst are those who gave the orders to kill year after year, and year after year misled our soldiers into believing that they were heroes "protecting our freedom", and "fighting for democracy", and never mind reading the Encyclopedia Britannica on how many democratic governments our CIA overthrew and how many U.S. interests friendly brutal dictators it protects. Today it doesn't take much to mislead our service men and women. Jingoism has been preached by war favoring media to its captive audiences of children in school and at home on its various outlets, not only the TV screen.
As graphically shown by Moyer on PBS in "Buying the War", these war promoting killers in our midsts are backed up by a killer-subservient media sufficiently powerful to overcome any dissenting journalism. "Buying the War" showed up Judith Miller, and William Safire of the NY Times, Bill Kristol, the anchors of all five networks and many other name media personages as fools, knaves or morally bankrupt coconspirators, so we won't be reading about it in the Times nor in any other source of pro war journalism exposed by Moyer on PBS. And conglomerate media will be avoiding further mention of Dennis Kucinich filing articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, one of the best known killers in our midst.
This war supporting mainstream commercial media is presently back to "body counts" of "suspected Taliban" and Iraqi "insurgents"- shades of the undeclared war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Daily reports of our airships having killed 71, or 43, or only 7, on such and such a day, unconfirmed - invariably followed by some complaint of the strike having killed women and children. How does that rate in comparison with Virginia Tech or Columbine?
Apropos, on 60 Minutes, former Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey, in defense of Navy Seals under his command killing the 19 women and children that got him a medal, "They were, at the very least, Viet Cong sympathizers."
How is the delicate mind of a pitifully confused, fright and hate propelled school massacre perpetrator going to react to such easy justifications for killing even children, in our nations sacred wars, blessed by clergy, media, teachers and university presidents?
These young students, danerous-to-themselves-and-others, for being mentally ill, will have had their basic senses intact, sometimes keenly so. Would they not have observed that Afghan, Iraqi, Panamanian and Indochinese civilians killed, apparently deserve no lament, no mention, not on TV, nor in the halls of Congress. Only U.S. men and women of the heroically invading or occupying armed forces have human attributes. They are fine, honorable, fun loving, etc., and so deserve our profound respect for their ability to use guns and ultimately our deep sorrow for their sacrifice. Foreign life has no value, unless taken by those fighting the American occupation of their homeland, and then it becomes poignantly decried, and held up as an example of the cruelty of America's enemies.
The occasional "My Lai" or trials of Americans for torture, rape and murder that couldn't be squelched, are embarrassments, but are portrayed as some quirk, something that just happens in war. Those millions of Vietnamese killed - they never existed, except as potential communists - they died, their families didn't grieve. Iraqis and Afghans and now Somalis, they only exist as potential anti- U.S. terrorist sympathizers - they are so much more charmingly civilized than the space age weaponry armed undereducated kids from the wealthy superpower's 250 year old commercial trading culture, but they just don't matter and never did. Americans are too caught up in their own desperate attempt to salvage some modicum of America's past family values to even know the ten fold deeper held family values of these ancient societies they do their best to destroy, without ever understanding why.
This is the violent truth that gets absorbed by all of us, not only our on-the-edge emotionally upset future school shooters, unbalanced minds in the midst of an ostentatiously affluent but desperate society afflicted by selfishness, anxiety and depression. Boom! Boom, boom!, is everywhere in the news, on the block, in rap lyrics, featured in violent love of war and guns TV programs, video-games, and movies.
When there is school ground or campus mass murder, it is just the tiniest manifestation of the role-modeled deadly intentions of our senior officials at the very top, as they threaten to bomb or invade various uncooperative small nations. Stern, shoulders back, with elbows cocked at the side mimicking a less evolved primate's menacing stance, the orders to kill by 'daisy cutter' , bunker buster, napalm and cluster bombs are given daily. We watch in astonishment and in fear that all this killing will make for a future retaliation more devastating than 9/11 (which our homeland security and scientists keep warning us has a 50/50 chance of happening, no matter what we do.)
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