A Feminine, Philosophical, Holistic Perspective
Regarding Aggression
My own photo: A new tree growing inside the trunk of an old, fallen tree.
Mass shootings have been plaguing America. While much of the public discussion focuses on guns and gun control, NRA and 2nd Amendment rights, I was having a few different thoughts, in an attempt to address the larger problem, holistically:
The more our nation spends on armament, police force and on the military, the more militant our youth seems to become. Our current administration has appropriated a huge new budget for our military, and school shootings increased, and bombs were delivered to political opponents. The more the military focuses on overkill, on ever deadlier technologies and weaponry, the more individuals will associate weapons with power--perhaps other countries feel the same way and follow suit as well. America owns an arsenal of death, perhaps second only to Russia. Available numbers are not conclusive about this. There are conflicting reports on which country has a larger arsenal of nuclear warheads. In fact, it's impossible to find out the current status and if real efforts at mutual disarmament are taking place as warranted by the 2010 New START Treaty. Statistics published by Wikipedia, The Ploughshares Fund, The Federation of American Scientists and The Huffington Post vary as widely as 3,800 to 9,800 warheads in the US currently, with 4,350 to 12,000 owned by Russia, and a total global arsenal from 14,575 to ca. 25,440. Some say that America and Russia possess comparable numbers of nuclear warheads. But together, they surely possess more than 90% of the world's nukes. Since the US once, in 1967, had as many as 32,040 nukes, it seems to be true that we have made "efforts to reduce nuclear weapons for the last 35 years," as CNN reported on 12/10/18.
Be this as it may, with only 300 of them, "90 million...would die within the first half hour," and "9,600 nuclear warheads...could instantly massacre 2.88 BILLION people and leave most of the rest slowly dying in a nuclear wasteland. Isn't this a bit excessive?...asks Lawrence Wittner in his HuffPost Blog on 5/25/2011. Of course, I haven't even mentioned biological, chemical and weather warfare methods, or the over 1,000 nuclear testing detonations on US soil, with untold, long-lasting, toxic effects.
In summary, America is the most weaponized country on earth, spending more on its military than many other countries combined. We are also the only country who has used nuclear weapons in warfare--TWICE!
We the people are mostly unaware of our nation's arsenal and types of weapons, of their reach, power and effect, and WE THE PEOPLE have not been involved in approving any of it. At the same time, few of us have any idea on how many active wars we are involved in at any given time, how much we contribute to people's dying, suffering and/or being displaced, also when we sell weapons to other countries. I encourage you to view some film footage on the effects of nuclear explosions (soldiers could see, through their closed eyes, the bones in their hands, as they were trying to shield their eyes from the flash, among other effects), or of Nepalm, Agent Orange, and many other gruesome weapons we have employed, aimed at maximum human damage. All the while, we attempt to raise our children to be peaceful, cooperative and forgiving, disregarding the horrific contradiction between what we preach and what we collectively do or support, directly or indirectly, often due only to non-participation in government and politics.
It helps to remember that children will do as their leaders do, regardless of what those leaders say, and children also tend to affiliate and allign themselves with the most powerful figures they know. If more of us knew what all is done with our tax dollars to actually guide the world into intimidation via deadly force and power, we would scream! And by doing so, we'd truly be agents of peace and lead our youth back to the values we espouse, yet which can't be achieved with firepower and weapons built to annihilate life on earth.
Building weapons in the hope they'd never be used is INSANITY. The only weapon never used is the one which was never created. If a gun wasn't meant to be fired, we wouldn't have equipped it with a trigger. There wouldn't be a red telephone or nuclear codes. And if our youth weren't preoccupied with war, power and destruction, there wouldn't be all the computer games and movies featuring nothing but.
Let us rethink not only what values we wish to pass on to the next generation, but also how we want to teach them, with our behaviors matching our speech. Last but not least, we must be clear on who is teaching the children. Whom are they following and imitating, really? No one with undue firepower can be a good role model for peace and respect for life.
It's a downright miracle that not more people are, in fact, aggressive and militant. Still, domestic terrorism is on the rise, as are right and left extremists and those who would favor the bombing of North Korea. What still holds us in check, I believe--by a hair, it seems--is our desire and need to think of ourselves and of our nation as "decent people." And I do believe that people are, in fact, inherently decent, but also very afraid of "power" ourselves, feeling either insignificant or else willfully ignorant and non-participatory in democratic processes. If we continue along this road, we will continue to reap what we got: Ever more aggression and violence. Our involvement and self-education (or re-education?) is inevitable for the development of a new decency and civility.
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