In Chicago, between September 2007 and December 2008, 508 students were shot. That's more than 1 per day for those who don't want to do the math.
Violence is a rampant disease in the urban centers of this country, and all we get are new assault rifles for the police. Weapons that can shoot precisely up to 2 miles, through walls and cars. Because the police are pulling these same weapons off the streets at the rate of more than 1 per day. 1 assault rifle, 1 injured or dead child. How many more children will be injured or killed with the police now legally carrying these weapons?
Violence is not something that humans tend toward naturally. Not in a killing kind of way. Of all the moms I know who mother boys, they say hands down that their boys figure out how to make guns or weapons out of anything, even in pacifist homes. But they all say that this violence is not the same as the numbness and deliberate killing done by and to the children on the streets of Chicago. That type of violence has to be deliberately inculcated in children so that they might be used as soldiers on the streets.
Yes, violence is something that is taught. And it is not an easy lesson to swallow, as our natural instinct is to survive unscathed -- flight first.
While the media and the police feed the population the idea that bigger weapons and more protections are needed on the streets of the urban landscape, I can't help but see footage from our own nightly news sources, as well as various African and South Asian countries when this is brought up. Children hand-cuffed and led by the dozens into paddy wagons. Children scattering into the night as one in their midst holds a hand gun. Children holding guns aimed at tanks. Children planting hand made mines as the finely outfitted soldiers bear down. Children starving and surviving as they have been taught in order to outsmart and outlive the government whose guns and numbers are bigger.
No, bigger guns are not what we need. Might does not make right, and right cannot be enforced through the use of might.
What we face is patriarchal and hierarchal society, in which those on top get to the top by standing on those on the bottom. In order to rise, then, those on the bottom have to learn and use the tactics they see used by the oppressors. And while the US may have a pretty vision and a value system upon which we claim our moral high ground, it has been proven repeatedly that our words are just words, that we don't walk the talk, and that our citizenship will never be all inclusive in an egalitarian way. As long as we prefer to let might make right, to let our education system stigmatize and label us into classes, to perpetuate a caste system based not only on money but on the color of skin and the straightness of hair and the use of certain dialect, we cannot possibly expect that our children will be anything but soldiers in this war we wage against ourselves. It doesn't take a degree and statistics to see that our wars "on Poverty" and "on Drugs" are just economic fictions, created to boost some while keeping others in their place at the foot of the pyramid.
Our children are soldiers, fighting to get a pair of boots. Boots with which they can pull themselves up with, with which they can get a good grip on the heads and backs of those they will have to climb up and over in order to reach the top.
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Unfortunately children soldiers are exactly what they want:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=69601
I have heard more about this but can't be sure of the validity of all of the claims. But I do know that if they can give the largest group of most brainwashed individuals power over the rest of us "non-conformist" they don't have to do the dirty work themselves.
oh! that is fairly terrifying!
ReplyDeleteand you're exactly right, the dirty work never seems to come from where it is in fact coming from. where is the blood of revolution to water the tree of freedom when we need it? couple this with the bills on personhood, and we're pretty much pushing up daisies on our liberty.
I quote the following from your essay:
ReplyDelete"Our children are soldiers fighting to get a pair of boots."
These words instantly brought something and someone to mind that helped form my view of what has, for too long, been our wretched societal hierarchy.
Nelson Algren is (was...he died in 1981) one of this country's greatest and most neglected writers of all time (and a Chicago native). He wrote about the nasty underbelly of urban life from the Great Depression on, shining light on all the things that "polite society" didn't want us to see.
I first came across his work during my formative, teenage years, but he has stayed with me...i cannot shake the incredible power and raw beauty in his writing.
I say all of this because his first novel, which is no longer in print and is almost impossible to find (but I did!) is called, "Somebody in Boots." To Algren, this phrase encapsulated the dreams of all the "have-nots" - to be somebody in boots, somebody with more power than the people they had to step on to get to where they were. In Algren's world, this uncaring ferocity is learned, not inborn, through years of living under the whip of the rich and powerful. The poor are crushed repeatedly until that is the only way they know how to scratch out some space for themselves. Our innate sense of caring and cooperation is stamped out by somebody in boots to the point where that becomes our goal.
Thank you for your words. Just thought I'd share my first response.
Gedalya -
ReplyDeleteyes. it is so true. violence is not born, it is trained. and our current style of leadership and power - to step on others to have leadership and power - is also something learned, not something born. a quick read, and interesting, is FistStickKnifeGun.