Mass Killings: Why American Men Are "Going Postal" [View all]

[sinkingfeeling]

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14183-mass-killings-why-american-men-going-postal

This is an excellent piece that ties together America's problems and why we have our violent nature. Well worth the read. I've snipped some pieces here:

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It is all the more remarkable because the race and gender of the perpetrators was not discussed. Surely, if all of the mass killers were African-American that would have been noticed. If all those people were killed by white women or immigrants, that too would have been a topic of discussion, to say the least. Somehow the fact that the killers were white men seemed unremarkable. That is a clue to consider.

What could make US white males so angry?

Mass killings became a new phenomenon in the 1980s when Reagan's platform of disempowerment of white, male workers, began. Asian men had at that point also been largely included in the hegemonic gender.

Four-fifths of the jobs lost in our current recession have been male jobs in manufacturing, construction and big-ticket sales. The decisions to export American jobs were based solely on corporate profit regardless of the extensive social and personal damages those decisions produced. Within capitalism that is how decisions are made.

The blind rage of mass killings is a wake-up call. We have to look at the interaction of all the conditions of existence that combine to generate America's mass killings. At present, the US is home to a vast group of predominantly white, dispossessed, enraged men. We have a political system that permits vast money at the top to hijack our politics and culture with unlimited "gifts." Our airwaves are sold to the highest bidder. We have powerful lobbies that sell US militarism and gun ownership as refuges for dispossessed men. We have profit churning mass media with films, videos, and advertisements pushing violence as a solution to problems from intimate life to international relations. We have a dysfunctional public mental health care system. We have limited mass positive political and social movements, and no socialist power blocks to capture and channel rage at the grotesque inequality that dominates our nation and denies our young men.
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