On June 6th, just a few weeks prior to this article, a woman complained to the local Burger King restaurant because she believed the burger she had contained too much hot sauce. She left the restaurant, only to return later on with her male associate and started shooting at the employees in the parking lot. The two were later caught and arrested for attempted first degree murder.
I wish this was just some random incident of sheer insanity, but this was just a sprinkle in the deluge of violent incidents happening across America in the past few months.
Here in the Atlanta area there have been a rash of road rage incidents, including shootings on the highway, that seeming have been happening on a daily basis. Thankfully the local media have been doing their best to not make a thing of it, but just the reporting of it is enough for the average person to know that this is not normal, and it is getting worse.
People have been going on rage-attacks against service people, flight attendants, store managers, even police officers. A flight attendant had two teeth knocked out of her mouth from a violent incident back in May. The Federal Aviation Administration has reported a mind-boggling 2500 incidents of “unruly” passengers in just the first half of 2021 alone. That’s thirteen incidents per day on airplanes across the country. People getting drunk and disruptive, people starting fights, people having panic attacks.
Thirteen incidents per day on airplanes across the country.
Our roads are in anarchy. Our fast-food restaurants are shooting galleries. Our airlines are boxing rings.
Yes, the pandemic plays a part in it. Or, specifically, the refusal of certain people to still wear masks. Yes, certain places still require it, even if you’ve been vaccinated. Hospitals still require it. Airlines still require it. Some stores still require it. The FAA says that an estimated 1900 of the 2500 incidents as of this column’s posting involve people refusing to wear masks as part of the air travel requirements during a still-ongoing global pandemic. A cashier in a Dekalb County store was murdered by a customer who refused to follow the store’s mask requirement on June 14th, just two weeks prior to this article’s posting. The self-entitled idiot didn’t want to wear his mask properly, so his go-to was to get a gun and then go back and kill people.
What. The. Effing. Hell?!?
Now I know that some red-hats will instantly blame President Joe Biden for all of this, because, hey, their lord and savior Narcissist Donald Trump got a lot of heat for violence… except that Biden, for his faults, has never advocated that people get “roughed up” like his failure of a predecessor did constantly. Biden never boasted about how he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters like the narcissist boasted in 2016. Biden never glorified a congressman from Montana for physically assaulting a reporter like Narcissist Trump did in 2018.
Oh and let’s not forget that on January 6th of this year a certain group wearing a certain red hat started a violent insurrection that led to the deaths of five people and desecrated the U.S. Capitol Building. They weren’t “tourists” or “Antifa” or anything other than the violent mob that they were, and they were there because a certain narcissist in the White House – and it was not Biden – told them to march there and stop what he called “the steal”. Talk about your violent incidents.
So, yeah, we have a serious violence problem.
But this isn’t something that just recently sprung up. Hell, yours truly has been noticing the rise in violent outbreaks going back to the 1990’s. Oklahoma City, the Olympic Park bombing, school shootings, workplace shootings, clinic shootings, the police shootings, every instance getting worse and worse. And now, of course, the insurrection.
We like to blame alcohol for the violence, because, as Bill Maher just alleged, we’re able to drink more readily and at different places. And, yeah, even I think being able to drink booze at the Starbucks as opposed to, say, an actual bar, is a bit too much. But alcohol doesn’t create violence as much as it decreases your inhibition that would otherwise stop you from being violent. Road-ragers are usually stone-cold sober when they ram their vehicle or get out to scream at the other driver. And I have yet to hear any fast-food rager claim of being drunk when they decided to open fire on or otherwise assault those workers.
Yes, there is violence in the media and violence in the video games, but we’ve had that. “Mortal Kombat” and “Street Fighter” never led to workplace violence. It just led to bad movies based on the games. I have yet to see a first-person shooter based on a Tom Clancy story encourage people to overthrow the country. “The Basketball Diaries” and “The Matrix” series never led to school or workplace shootings any more than a movie about “Lizzy Bordon” led to a rise in patricide ax murders.
But there are a few other things that need to be noted…
We are getting more and more stressed. “Anxiety”? No, it’s called stress.
The vast majority of us are being told that we have to work harder and struggle and sacrifice. Cost of living is going up, but our workplaces would rather we accept miniscule raises if any at all, because, you know, profit is more important to them. And, again, this isn’t something that just happened, but something that has been going on for decades. The pandemic didn’t make things any better. Remember when those of us who had to still work were considered “essential”? Not “essential” for hazard pay, but still “essential”. Yeah, a lot of those folks are now target practice for self-entitled Karens and Kens, or else they’re considered “lazy” and “deadbeats” by their employers and their big-money friends on TV.
There is an ongoing injustice in America that seemingly gets worse and worse. Big Banks collapse the economy during the Great Recession, but nobody there goes to prison for it. They just moved on to the next scam, tuition loans. And then the next one, “buy here pay here” car loans. And so on and so forth. Even when caught, like Wells Fargo did, they get away with it, and then they get caught yet again a few years later and nothing is done to address it.
It takes a series of nationwide protests for an abusive cop who murders someone in broad daylight to not only be charged and convicted, but to also be sent to prison, when his own attorneys demanded he be let free with “time served”. And how many others were killed and got away with it? Laws are broken by people in positions of power, but not one person has yet to be arrested or even criminally charged. We just hear what “could” happen; never what needs to happen.
Telemarketers continually harass Americans, but seemingly nothing is done to stop them. Salespeople refuse to accept “NO” for an answer. Customer service is crap. We can’t talk to humans anymore. We’re pressed to go to a website or an automated phone service, and even that doesn’t work anymore. Even when we pay extra for a service to forgo the ads, they still find a way to put ads in!
Road rage is an issue, but nothing is getting done to resolve that. It seems like every effort to “help” with traffic only makes it worse and encourages more self-entitled arrogant aggressive drivers to continue being more aggressive. Ban the guns? Doesn’t work when the weapon of choice is an SUV or a pickup truck.
Even the insurrection is proof of this ongoing injustice. The FBI have arrested hundreds of participants, but nobody is talking about going after the chief instigators; the ones on top who wound up the insurrectionists and sent them to the Capitol Building and then watched from a distance with pleasure. Instead, we want to have “hearings” and “commissions”. Tell me, if your workplace was broken into and vandalized, graffiti all over the place and excrement smeared on the walls and floors, would you want the police to investigate and arrest the people responsible, or would you want them to have a “commission” to “explore the possibilities” and pursue “new methods to ensure it doesn’t happen again”?
All of this is leading to violence. The stress, the aggravation, the injustices, the screwjobs, it’s all leading people to resort to violence. Because we feel like nothing is actually getting done. We feel helpless. We feel like the only way we can get anything done is through violence and force, because that seems to be the only option left.
And, yes, that includes the red-hat cult followers of that narcissist and his fascist enablers. The very reason why they took part in that insurrection was because they are made to feel like that is the only way to prevail. They continually hear from the fascist echo chambers about how “their election” was “stolen” and of a “great conspiracy” that needs to be “stopped”. That’s why a lot of them did what they did in January. And it will happen again if their leaders are not held to account for their actions.
Let’s get brutally honest here… violence is a serious problem in America, and it’s not going to go away until we fix the problems that lead us to think it should be our go-to. We’ve been blaming booze and TV and video games when we really need to look at the screwjobs out there, the injustices, the economic inequalities, and start dealing with those. Outlawing booze and video games and TV shows won’t solve it. And, no, banning guns won’t either. A Ford F-150 kills just the same as an AK-47 when you have a self-entitled angry man involved. I don’t see anyone talking about taking away pickup trucks and SUVs.
I get it. America is a country founded on violence. It came from a violent revolution that not everyone wanted, and every so often the only way things get done in this country is through force. Slavery was ended through a civil war. Civil rights only came about because of violence and force. We celebrate our independence with flags, parades, and very loud and colorful explosions. But just because we have that history, that doesn’t mean that we should resort to violence for everything. Because then that’s not a country... that’s dystopian anarchy.
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