Sadness

The picture below is one that most of the world would recognize – a little Iraqi girl who has the blood of her parents on her hands. And most of the world could tell you how her parents died, and when it happened.

But most Americans could not.

A blogger that I follow, Dennis Perrin, had a death in the family recently. His sister was murdered while pumping gas last weekend. It happened north of Indianapolis. The gunman then committed suicide. Dennis has some thoughts on that, as well as the recent mall shooting in Nebraska. Deepest sympathies to Dennis and his entire family.

A commenter on the last post pointed to a story about a man in Guantanamo prison who tried to kill himself by slashing his wrist with his own fingernail.

Here in my home town, little ole Asheville North Carolina, we had four homicides in less than 10 days. That is a lot for our area. The population is about 170,000 in this county.

We have such a violent society here in the USA, and that reality is denied by a great many of Americans. I don’t know what the answer is – I used to think better gun control would be the right way to go – but the truth is, there are other countries that have even more guns than Americans do and they don’t have the homicide and suicide rate that we have.

It is really unbelievable that we now have a country where our government (without any qualms) kidnaps, tortures, rapes, murders and commits genocide. Of course, we are a country founded on genocide and violent resistance. Every time someone points out that our country had to fight for our “independence” I have to point out the other British colonies that became independent without a war or any violence. So, the obvious conclusion is that violence was not necessary for our country to be independent.

And, as a recent article I read said: “A Change Ain’t Gonna Come” in regards to the next Democratic presidency. We can expect the next Democratic president to be more competent at running things and we can expect him or her to make some effort at cooperating with the rest of the world – but overall, the same policy objectives will remain in place here in America.

And that is damn sad.