We Have Become Death

In the darkness of the Sandy Hook killings, many search for answer and struggle with resolution. Below are words of others, defining us as a nation.

As we grasp for definition, the world's largest arms dealer arms its surrogate for yet another war in a troubled region shunning diplomacy.

The sad irony is that the US overthrew a democratically elected leader to protect BP, installed a brutal dictator and subsequently armed that nation with chemical weapons to fight its neighbor, also armed by the US.

As mass exporters of death around the world, we truly wonder why?

Israel Is Set To Receive 5,000 US Bunker Buster Bombs After Delaying Its Attack On Iran

By Michael Kelley

The U.S. Department of Defense notified Congress of a $647 million agreement to provide the Israel Air Force with 10,000 bombs - more than half of which are bunker-busters.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33363.htm

In the US, Mass Child Killings are Tragedies. In Pakistan, Mere Bug Splats

By George Monbiot

Barack Obama's tears for the children of Newtown are in stark contrast to his silence over the children murdered by his drones.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33361.htm

We Have Become Death

By Camillo Mac Bica

"We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." - Robert Oppenheimer First broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965)

December 18, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - “Evil visited this community today,” is how Governor Molloy described the awful events that occurred at a Newtown Connecticut Elementary school. Whenever a “terrorist” attacks and innocents are slaughtered, we begin referencing religious concepts and asking the inevitable questions. Why do they hate us? Why would someone commit such an atrocity? Why was a flawed, obviously insane individual allowed access to weapons? The 24 hour cable “news” networks voyeuristically “report” firsthand accounts and talking head “experts” speculate regarding motive and intent. But yet we ignore the obvious, and refuse to look at who we are, better, what we’ve become, as a nation, a people, that makes such awful events not an aberration, but an all too common occurrence of slaughter and mayhem.

We live in a culture where violent video games replaced Mr. Rogers as entertainment for our children; where the youngest and most impressionable among us “cyber kill” virtual human beings for amusement, to occupy their time, and to prepare them to become weapons in perpetual war that goes unquestioned; where violence has replaced diplomacy; where torture is condoned; where truth telling ("whistle blowing") is a crime warranting imprisonment and solitary confinement; where murder is celebrated as a positive achievement of leadership and as evidence for a candidate’s qualification for four more years as president; where drones summarily execute human beings without trial, accusation, and with little outrage many of whom are innocents dehumanized as “collateral damage”; where the adoration of the weapons and technology of killing and destruction ("Memorial Day Air Shows”) serve to honor the wasted in war and to ritualize the changing of seasons.

We are a culture of hate, greed, and violence, killing our own as we kill others. We have lost our moral compass and have become the pariah of the human community. So Governor Molloy, I fear that evil is not merely an unwelcome visitor but lives among us and if I may quote the Bhagavad Gita, we “have become death the destroyer of worlds.”

My purpose in this commentary is not to exploit the deaths of victims and the suffering of families for political purposes. Rather it is an attempt first to bring attention to the murder, suffering, and pain of ALL innocents much of which is a direct consequence of American foreign policy (imperialism); second, it is an attempt to move beyond the useless rhetoric of American Exceptionalism in order to critically and fairly examine who we are, what we've become, and what we stand for as a people and as a nation; and finally, it is a plea for sanity, compassion, and morality so that we will no longer have to suffer and grieve the senseless and unnecessary deaths of innocents ANYWHERE in the world. To bring attention and awareness to the suffering of ALL innocents is not to be insensitive to or diminish the suffering of some. Children are children, each as important and as valuable as the other and murderers are murderers, each as despicable and reprehensible as the other. So let us grieve the children and then ACT to increase awareness of our failings in order to ensure that such insanity never occurs again.
Camillo Mac Bica is a Professor of Philosophy at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and the Coordinator of Veterans For Peace Long Island.

 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33368.htm

What If Children Mattered No Matter Where They Lived–and Died?
By Peter Hart

December 18, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - We do not live in a world that treats all life equally. Not even close. Human beings inevitably feel certain tragedies more deeply, based on proximity to the victims, national identity, the circumstances of death and so on.

 

It is not surprising that there has been so much media attention paid to the horrible massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The thought of small children being gunned down in a classroom is shocking and tragic. And the usual suggestions to avoid "politicizing" a tragedy by talking about public policy decisions that might prevent future tragedies seem to have less resonance this time around.

 

When we draw comparisons between a particular event and other similar tragedies, it is not to say that they all matter equally, but to remind ourselves that we're conditioned to feel that some matter quite a bit more than others.

 

When I heard the news about Newtown, I thought of previous mass shootings in this country. That is perhaps a natural reaction.But then I also thought about the case of Sgt. Robert Bales. He is accused of massacring 16 Afghan civilians earlier this year, nine of them children. It is not the only atrocity of the Afghan War, but the accounts of the attack are particularly horrifying. Bales allegedly left his base and entered the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, near Kandahar. He proceeded to kill the victims as they slept, and then burned some of their bodies.

 

It is not that U.S. media failed to cover the atrocity. But the tone of the coverage placed considerable weight on the damage these deaths would do to the war effort (FAIR Media Advisory, 3/12/12). Questions were posed like, "Could this reignite a new anti-American backlash in the unstable region?" One headline stated, "Killings Threaten Afghan Mission." USA Today actually had on its front page, "Patriot Now Stands Accused in Massacre."

 

Seeing the atrocity this way prioritizes issues like national security–and obscures the fact that children were killed in their sleep, and that the person alleged to have killed them was a member of our military. This particular incident is, in some ways, just a more horrifying version of many other U.S. attacks that killed children in Afghanistan, or the drone attacks that have killed hundreds in Pakistan.

 

It is understandable, on some level, that these deaths will not affect most Americans the same way as the deaths in Newtown. They are deaths in a poor, violent country most of us will never see.

 

But that should not prevent us from asking ourselves–and our media–why that is, and wondering what our politics and our culture might look like if media decision-makers felt that that stories like this deserved more attention.

 

One has to imagine that our world would be different if we treated every tragic death as if it mattered. U.S. media shy away from imagery that could be considered too explicit or graphic–especially when it calls attention to suffering caused or endured by U.S. forces.

 

As journalist Amy Goodman has said on countless occasions, if our media showed the brutal consequences of U.S. warmaking, those policies would change.

 

Sometimes these discussions can be quite explicit. Time's Joe Klein's comment that four-year-olds in Pakistan might have to die from drone attacks so that four-year-old Americans do not die in terrorist attacks was a reminder that, for some people, some lives are practically expendable.

 

So what would a healthier media look like? It wouldn't tell us not to grieve over Newtown. It would tell us that violence against children is deplorable no matter where it happens, or who inflicts it–and that there are things we can do to stop it, both close to home and many miles away.

 

Peter Hart is the activism director at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).

 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33367.htm