Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
by Chris Hedges
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
May 13, 2013
Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States believes in regeneration through violence. We have carried out blood baths on foreign soil and on our own land for generations in the vain quest of a better world. And the worse it gets, the deeper our empire sinks under the weight of its own decay and depravity, the more we kill.
[…]
via Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
Copyright © 2013 Truthdig
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If human beings fear death, that is natural enough. It is instinctive, it is part of our impulse to survive. It is a healthy and necessary advisory; only, to exaggerate fear is a mistake. Fear is just the emotion that stimulates our innate defense reflex, to fight or fly. Respect would be a better term, because death is inevitable for every organism. All life is terminal, because of its biology.
That survival instinct becomes pathological when it finds grotesque expression through the neurosis of vicarious fulfillment, as in the obsessive persecution of some “other;” a perverse craving that is only completely satisfied when it requires blood sacrifice.
Shedding blood is quite natural ~ if you happen to be female. But when you are male, to whom or for what is this “other’s” sacrifice made? Who is atoning for whom & to whom? And for why? Why is it good and necessary to bathe this precious world in blood? Why is that desirable and manly, honorable and exciting and “just?”
I would say this, if you must kill, then kill for a reason. If you have no legitimate reason, other than uncontrollable fear or blood lust, then please abstain. For if your killing is for a reason, whatever that purported reason, it is only legitimate when it can stand up to moral scrutiny and therefore shown to be necessary.
It is the banality of indifferent and gratuitous violence that is so sickening. Chris Hedges is right, murder has become a contemptible “sport” whether it be innocent children in Palestine and the the Middle-east generally (or anywhere else for that matter as we know only too well is the case,) or visited upon beautiful and noble wild creatures like Lions or Tigers ~ to alleviate the impotence of impoverished and deranged Asian “men.” That is not a racist slur ~ it is a demonstrable fact of our sick lives. If what passes for commerce and acceptable practice in Guajong is permitted, then everything is; and nothing is either safe or sacred.
Sport itself is a misnomer. Is “cage fighting” a sport? Personally I think not. In my opinion it is a lurid symptom of a profoundly endemic disease. Gratuitous violence is the sport of psychopaths. Our society is led by psychopaths, celebrates their insanity and is itself now predominantly psychopathic.
It is heart breaking to read this.
America the beautiful?
A country full of people who don’t care as long as it does not affect them personally.
Just like we are a country at war and most people are asleep.
When is this nation going to wake up?
When is all the killing going to stop?
Not many are listening!!!