America is Violent

I think it’s time as a nation we acknowledge our violence problem. Not just our gun violence problem, but our tendency towards violence overall.

With today’s news that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed following only months on from the assassination of Democratic lawmaker Marissa Hortman, the political violence has certainly reached a dangerous crescendo. But the violence does not start and end with political violence. America is desensitized to violence overall, and often sees it as a solution. We have a serious ongoing mental health problem in this country on top of economic inequality that leads some people to feel that there is no way out other than aggression.

You cannot be surprised at the way many people here resort to violence. We are a nation founded upon violent colonization and revolution with gun-violence and action-fighting as its favorite source of entertainment. I recently sat in a movie theater and watched preview after preview of movies with bloody fighting, gun violence and solving problems with physical force. Not to sound like Tipper Gore here, but this glorification of violence, especially absent the consequences, creates an environment where violence is in essence normalized, even glorified as a solution. How many times have you seen a viral short on TikTok or YouTube where two people are fighting, throwing hands in public over some ridiculous disagreement? People often treat it as comedy!

No amount of mental health intervention and gun control (which I absolutely support) will be successful if we do not analyze our nation’s obsession with violence and the overall desensitization to it. It is going to take a conscious effort and a lot of soul searching to debunk American myths like manifest destiny, colonization, slavery, cowboys and indians and our nation’s complicity in shipping violence as our main export around the world. All of these examples are often covered without noting the consequences of violence. We teach history in this country without showing the bodies, showing the results. We have a news media that does not care to faithfully explore the consequences of US foreign policy. We have Hollywood that shows shooting after shooting without the realistic results of that action; a tendency parodied to great effect in Tarantino’s Django Unchained. The blood bath at the end of Tarantino’s western is absolutely a commentary on gun violence depicted on screen. It turns the camera back onto us, as he did with the end of many movies including his last, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That last film was brutal to watch, and yet people in my theater were laughing. What is wrong with folks here? It’s gross.

There is so much more I can say right now, but this is sort of where my mind is currently at. We need to do better. I don’t like this new normalcy.