What's Behind All The Violence In America Today - Video

America Is A Violent Country

The reality untaught in American schools and textbooks is that war — whether on a large or small scale — and domestic violence have been pervasive in American life and culture from this country’s earliest days almost 400 years ago. Violence, in varying forms, according to the leading historian of the subject, Richard Maxwell Brown, “has accompanied virtually every stage and aspect of our national experience,” and is “part of our unacknowledged (underground) value structure.” Indeed, “repeated episodes of violence going far back into our colonial past, have imprinted upon our citizens a propensity to violence.”

Thus, America demonstrated a national predilection for war and domestic violence long before the 9/11 attacks, but its leaders and intellectuals through most of the last century cultivated the national self-image, a myth, of America as a moral, “peace-loving” nation which the American population seems unquestioningly to have embraced. But the Reality tells different story.

Kieran Healy has a chart:

The blue line at the top is the US; the other lines are for other advanced countries. I grew up in the America marked by that peak in violence.

Let’s have a look at a example of the history of American Violence.

Running with this notion – the idea that there’s not a huge divide between violent people and everybody else – I dug around a little further, and found more than a few scientific studies suggesting that ordinary American lives are pretty violent. Violence can hide in the the nooks and crannies of our habits, the habits of our kids and through social networks.

Take dating violence, for example. Emily Rothman, associate professor at Boston University School of Public Health recently, published a study on dating violence among teenagers in December of 2010 in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. She surveyed around 1,500 students from the Boston area. Rothman found that:

… Nearly 19% of students reported physically abusing a romantic partner in the past month, including pushing, shoving, hitting, punching, kicking or choking. Nearly 43% reported verbally abusing their partner, cursing at them or calling them fat, ugly, stupid or some other insult.

Video for Teen dating violence: What every parent should know.

 

It appears that  the violence that has occurred this year is not an aberration. Instead, it’s a reflection of universal human fragility, and the entrenched violence of our lives.

I would say that violence is probably innate. It has served some purpose throughout history, but that does not mean that it’s our destiny.