At church this weekend, our minister explored the violence
that killed 20 2nd and 3rd grade children and six adults
in Newtown, CT. With point blank accuracy,
one 20 year old disturbed kid, stilled the life of those young children. The father of one of the slain, Robbie Parker
said of his daughter Emilie, “I was honored to be her father.” I wept as did one of our other ministers. Hundreds of others in the congregation visibly
shuddered.
This tragedy follows in the wake of Columbine in Littleton,
Colorado 13 years ago with Harris and Klebold. This fall a man named James Holmes
shot up an entire movie theater, also in Denver. A Muslim U.S. Army Major Hasan shot 42
innocent people. The Times Square bomber and thousands of other acts of
violence have devolved us into a violent, unsafe and frightening culture.
It’s not the individual acts that make us a violent
culture. We promote violence on TV with
incredibly violent programs like NCIS in NYC, in Los Angeles and in Miami. Criminal Minds TV show creates horrific and
sickening criminal torture and death plots.
Springer, Povich, Cunningham and other moronic TV shows celebrate
illiteracy, the dregs of society and sheer violence. We create unspeakable
brutality via other TV shows. Our movies
depict the sickening world of masochists and sadists while movie goers absorb
these graphics deep within their minds.
In every town, you may go to a video arcade and watch kids commit
murder, mayhem, slaughter and staggering acts of violence—with glee, joy and a
sense of victory. All of it mindless,
yet potent toward further real life carnage within our society.
On our highways, drunk drivers killed 17,000 to as high as
20,000 innocent lives every single year with their weapon of choice—a 4,000
pound missile speeding down the highway at 75 miles per hour drunk or high on drugs—but
we refuse to construct drunk driving laws that would make the crime more prohibitive
than the offense. We promote alcoholism via
beer commercials sensationalizing the lifestyle of alcohol, replete with
beautiful women and fast cars.
Our U.S. Congress reeks of warmongering by starting the
Korean War, Vietnam War, Desert Storm War and Iraq War for no valid reason
whatsoever. We killed millions of people
and destroyed millions of parents, adults and children. Millions!
We remain in Afghanistan, long after bin Laden met his death—still killing
their people and ours—with no positive result.
Over the decades, our drones and bombs have created hundreds
of thousands of “Newtown, Connecticut’s” where millions of people have died in
the aforementioned countries. We insist
on maintaining 450,000 military personnel on 700 bases around the world to show-case
our ability to kill anyone whose perspective doesn’t match ours.
After the 10 year Vietnam War, over 200,000 of our soldiers
became so distraught from their experiences—they committed suicide. Today, an average of four present and former
US soldiers commit suicide daily from their war traumas. Millions more emotionally
limp along from drugs, depression, PTSD and alcoholism. Some experts predict another 200,000 U.S.
soldiers will commit suicide from their military service in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
While we war upon other countries for decades, and after
Columbine’s mass murders, we fail to take care of our own youth such as the
young man who just killed 26 innocent human beings. An average of 18 teenagers commit suicide in
America every single day of the year, every year, every decade—without pause.
A mind-numbing 15,000 people kill others with their knives and
guns annually, year after year, decade after decade. Equally lethal, although self-imposed,
smokers of tobacco kill themselves off at 450,000 annually.
Let’s talk about men beating wives, girlfriends and lovers:
* There
are 1,500 shelters for battered women in the United States. There are 3,800 animal
shelters. Cruelty to animals abounds in the USA. (Schneider, 1990).
* Three
to four million women in the United States are beaten in their homes each year
by their husbands, ex-husbands, or male lovers. ("Women and
Violence," Hearings before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate
Hearing, 101-939, pt. 1, p. 12.)
* One
woman is beaten by her husband or partner every 15 seconds in the United
States. (Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation).
Our federal officials have arrested and slammed 37 million
kids into jail for smoking a joint in the past 41 years of the “War on Drugs”—while
alcohol and booze have killed endless millions—legally.
As our government foments, creates and imposes wars on
countries 10,000 miles away, we suffer the cruelty of 14 million jobless
Americans, 47.7 million living on food stamps, 1.5 million homeless and 2.3
million Americans subsisting in prisons.
The final costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan War will reach
into the trillions of dollars when that money could have been used to create a
more just, hopeful and prosperous society for all our citizens.
What we need to do
An evolutionary vision must occur within our country. We citizens must create peace in our schools
and communities. We must vote for leaders who insist on peace rather than
war. We need to move away from TV, movie
and arcade violence to peaceful understanding.
“Yes,” you say, “but what can I do?”
We need to shift from war spending toward life-enhancing
contributions to flourish our society. We
spend trillions of dollars on war and a tiny fraction for education and
betterment of our society.
What not to
continue because it doesn’t work:
·
Stop engaging in useless, costly, deadly and meaningless
wars overseas
·
Stop our empire building by bringing home
450,000 military personnel from those 700 bases. It wastes money, people and resources and it
accomplishes nothing.
·
Stop meddling in hundreds of countries’ business
as if the U.S. ethnocentric position constitutes
the bottom line of righteousness
·
Stop the War on Terror, War on Drugs and War on
Poverty because the energy of fighting anything pales in comparison to the
support of human dignity
·
Stop violent video games, violent movies,
violent TV programming
Transfer war funds to peace funding for our society:
·
Spend billions for jobs that give dignity to
citizens
·
Spend billions on after-school classes,
activities and playgrounds
·
Spend billions on mental health, emotional
health and well-being in families
·
Spend billions on high school marriage,
relationship and child rearing classes to support fathers and mothers in workable
marriages, which will result in viable lives for children
·
Spend billions to build personal responsibility,
personal accountability and educational excellence for all our citizens to grow
our civilization into a positive future
·
Spend billions on raising healthy, happy and
balanced children with mental health services, parental training and guidance
We Americans need to reassess ourselves. We need to invent or discover another
path. We need to open toward a spiritual
awakening.
We need to move toward slower living, inter-related living and environmentally
balanced living. We need to eschew
80,000 chemicals injected into our air, water and ground 24/7—most definitely
scrambling our emotions, body chemistries and minds. We need to live and grow in smaller, community-oriented
cities. (As John Muir said, “There is not a single sane man in all of San
Francisco.)
We need both fathers and mothers for our children so they grow into
healthy adults who value themselves and know they are essential. We must extricate ourselves from the
pervasive violence in our culture by moving toward peaceful solutions, love and
kindness.
This transformation requires you, your actions, your
passions, your energy and your optimism for the future.
##
Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents - from the Arctic to
the South Pole - as well as eight times across the USA, coast to coast and
border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to
Athens, Greece. In 2012, he bicycled coast to coast across America. His latest book is: How to Live a Life of
Adventure: The Art of Exploring the World by Frosty Wooldridge, copies at 1 888
280 7715/ Motivational program: How to Live a Life of Adventure: The Art
of Exploring the World by Frosty Wooldridge, click:
www.HowToLiveALifeOfAdventure.com