PHOTO/SARAH JANE RHEE
A young reporter and cameraman killed on live television. A nine year-old girl shot dead through her bedroom window as she sits doing homework. A mentally ill man held in jail until a bed in a hospital opens up beaten to death by three guards for refusing to take medication. A police officer slain in a northwest Chicago suburb. These are only a few of the recent recorded incidences of violence making the headlines.
Capitalism is dying. The economy is transforming from an industrial base to production with labor replacing robots and computers. The gap between wealth and poverty grows. (Oxfam estimates that by next year, 99% of the world’s wealth will be owned by less than 1% of the population.) As a result, society is turning in on itself and becoming more violent.
Our rulers cultivate this violence through a culture that equates militarism with patriotism. They cultivate a culture that exalts acts of individual and collective violence, starting with government war and torture policies, glorified by TV, radio and movies. They defend placing militarized police not only in urban centers but also suburbs and small towns in rural America. What are its roots?
Our economic system and the society built upon it were founded upon violence. The wholesale slaughter of Native Americans in the quest for land; the African slave trade that sold human beings as commodities to be worked to death in seven years; the maiming and deaths of children exploited in the mines and factories; the wars of imperialist expansion; these are the foundations for the profits amassed by a ruthless ruling class. Today’s violence cannot be separated from American history. We cannot change this psychology of violence without changing the economic and social system.
Where once the rulers were able to use a part of these profits as a bribe to keep people tied to the system, the bottom line is that the capitalists will not support workers they no longer need. The owners of the economy, along with their servants in government are devising new ways to guarantee their profits.
Passing laws that criminalize impoverished workers while guaranteeing 95% occupation rates for private prisons. Privatizing water to be sold only to those who can pay the higher price while denying life-sustaining water to those who cannot. Turning over our public schools to corporate profiteers. Selling off our public parks to private interests. Foreclosing on workers’ homes, forcing families into the streets as they are sold to hedge fund speculators for pennies on the dollar. The list goes on and on.
The burning question today for those of us in a fight for our survival is: Will we allow a system built upon violence to destroy us? Or will we unite around our common economic interests, remove the roots of this violence, and build a new society based on caring and sharing the abundance created by the revolutionary new technologies?
Today it is possible to create such a society. But to do so we must counter the culture of violence and individualism our masters have created. We must replace it with a culture that says the well-being of each individual depends upon the well-being of all of humanity.
