April 1st, 2022 will mark the 26th year that this commentator has been doing an online column.
Twenty-six years... and, in all that time, not to mention the fifty-five years of my existence, I have to say that I have never seen people more belligerent to each other than I do now.
Yes, things have been getting hostile since the early 90’s. Aggressive attitudes, war-talk, the occasional violent outburst from the lunatic fringe. Workplace violence and school violence and shootings in public places like malls did happen and they did cause a lot of media attention and public hand-wringing and political posturing and blaming. But it was never to the level of violence that we see today.
Yes, we still have school shootings and shootings in public places, but they don’t seem to have the impact on us as they did two decades ago. They happen, the air-fluffed ego-driven media talk about it, and then it’s back to the latest dog-and-pony show followed by weather and sports. They spend more time talking about who got traded in [INSERT LOCAL SPORTS TEAM HERE] than they do about the lives lost and what caused the killer to do what they do.
Yeah, maybe it’s because we all watched the Twin Towers get crashed by terrorists on live television back in 2001, followed by endless wars where we watched our parents and our children fight and die in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the endless threats of future terrorist attacks and being told to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape. Maybe it’s because violence happens so frequently now that people just are desensitized to it.
I remember when just the mention of a freeway killer, someone shooting up motorists, was a big thing. Today, there are people getting shot on Atlanta’s highways seemingly every week, and nobody is saying anything about it other than they happened. Are these separate incidents? Are they all from the same driver? We don’t know.
There was a guy in Miami who was caught on his own dashcam shooting at other vehicles as part of an escalated road rage incident. Most people didn’t even know about it until the dashcam video was released.
Even without shootings, road rage incidents are getting worse on the highways I travel every day. Drivers are getting more and more aggressive, leading to frayed tempers and accidents.
And it’s not just the roads. We have irate people assaulting doctors and nurses, threatening educators, and attacking airline attendants. They are openly attacking other people, sometimes because of who they are. They’ve called the police on other people for the simple “crime” of existing. These people have been given a name: Karen. And they are as much a menace to society as any other criminal. Maybe even worse because they are our neighbors.
Then we have the politicians. We just spent four years with a belligerent narcissist in the White House, leading a party of corrupt and violent acolytes and enablers. An elected congressman representing Montana physically assaulted a reporter in 2017, while said narcissist was busy telling people that the media are the “enemy of the people”. We’ve seen endless displays of police violence caught on camera, often being cheered on by this same faction of the narcissist. We’ve seen violent rhetoric, followed by a violent act of domestic terrorism and sedition with the ultimate goal of insurrection in January of 2021. A vile criminal act that has since been excused by the acolytes and enablers of that narcissist as being nothing more than “legitimate political discourse”. You know, like how the terrorist attacks of 2001 were nothing more than a “spirited disagreement”.
A narcissist so horrible and corrupt that the only other alternative was to support a previously retired politician that would otherwise not even be given a second thought, and who, to this very day, refuses to acknowledge that he lost to said previously retired politician. A narcissist that has openly bragged about being able to shoot someone in broad daylight and never go to jail for it, and who, as of this article’s posting, has yet to be held to account for the various criminals acts he is accused of committing over the years.
Let’s get brutally honest here... things have been getting worse in the past two-and-a-half decades since I started my column. And it’s not going to get better for us as a society or as a nation if we don’t do something about this continual escalation of hostility and violence.
History has shown that this kind of belligerent attitude has led to some of the worst times in human civilization. Civil War in America. Two world wars. They were each prefaced by escalating hostility and acts of violence. Tensions building and building until war was inevitable. If we want to prevent the next worst time, we need to stop the aggressive and belligerent natures here and hold those who commit them responsible.
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