This has got to stop. All this awful stuff.

[2naSalit]

21. So something comes to mind here which

I am sure will be upsetting to some but I have to say it because I have never said this to anyone before.

I don't watch TeeVee and so I am not regularly exposed to the violent entertainment that is all the rage these days. But once in a while I happen to be someplace where there is a TeeVee on and I can gauge how bad things are out there in our world. This goes back a few years but I distinctly recall at one point in year five or six of the Iraq war I saw some show, news or a documentary or some "special report", what I saw was appalling. I saw our military personnel kicking in the doors of civilians' home in the middle of the night and the inhabitants being treated in such a way that I was horrified, at how they rifle butted anyone who questioned them... they insisted that the male of the house was a bad guy and took him away after a few brutal blows that landed him on the floor and they hand cuffed him and put a hood over his head while the women and children cried. Interviewed the next day the military guys shrugged it off and said "That's our job, we have to show these guys who's in control. Someday they'll see what good we are doing for them." Winning hearts and minds?

And at the same time I realized that those same military people were also now trained to do this no matter where they were. I also knew that they were going to come back here to the US and take jobs as police and LEOs in our local, federal and state agencies, and this is what they are trained to do. The killing of whomever it is does not matter to them after a point, they were taught that the bad guy gets it, period.

This is what we have now and it won't stop until we can convince these people to stop their violence. I once met a prison guard out on the road in a western state who worked at a supermax prison. We chatted at a fuel stop and the take home message I got from that guy was what he said about his job... "Yeah, we get to rock and roll and get paid for it! I love it." So this told me that these guys love their violence, it generates an adrenaline flow which IS a drug, and there's a lot of our fellow citizens who are now hooked on it. There were quite a few before we started our recent wars but now we've got LOTS of them, and they get jobs as cops, and this is what they do, and get paid to do it, and they get away with killing innocent people.

Somehow our country has to get it together with detox of destructive addictions of this kind.