7 April 2009
Ten years ago this month two students opened fire on their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School...Two years ago, also in April, a student at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia killed 32 people and wounded 17 others, also before turning the weapon on himself...
In the past month, an eruption of violence in the US has accounted for the deaths of 53 people in seven mass shooting incidents.... No one in Washington cares to say the obvious: That the slaughter is a symptom of a diseased social order. As for the pundits, the tragedies that all too rapidly succeed one another in the headlines barely stir them into taking up column space or airtime. The comments and attempted explanations become ever more perfunctory.
That a human being might suffer a mental collapse under extreme conditions is an element of everyday life. That seven individuals pick up multiple, extremely lethal weapons and attempt to blot out as many lives as they can, often before taking their own, is a phenomenon shaped by social and historical circumstances.
The present socio-psychological environment, in which so many individuals, deranged though they may be, can cause the massive suffering and death of innocent people without flinching, cannot be accounted for without reference to recent trends in American life.
...the decades of political reaction in the US, rooted in economic decline... the encouragement of militarism and chauvinism, the worship of “free market” ruthlessness and selfishness, and a popular culture pervaded by brutal imagery and lyrics.
In the manner of mob bosses, Obama administration officials, like their counterparts under Bush, speak of “killing” or “taking out” their political enemies in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The “lone gunmen,” in some sense, are Frankenstein monsters produced by American society in advanced social and moral decline. In their own psychotic fashion, such individuals are merely taking the premises on which Wall Street, the Pentagon and the White House routinely operate and applying them to their personal dilemmas.
The economic crisis is undoubtedly exacerbating these tendencies, as it places the psychologically vulnerable under far greater than usual stress. All the more under conditions where America’s social safety net, highly porous at the best of times, has been shredded by Republican and Democratic governments at every level.
...Job loss has been a factor helping to trigger a number of the recent mass shootings. A study reported in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003 found that unemployment is the single strongest predictor in cases where men murder their wives. An abuser’s lack of employment increased the risk fourfold, the research found.
The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health published a study, also in 2003, concluding that “Being unemployed was associated with a twofold to threefold increased relative risk of death by suicide, compared with being employed. About half of this association might be attributable to confounding by mental illness.”
America is a country seething with discontent. Wide layers of the population, whose own conditions of life are deteriorating rapidly, watch in helpless fury as the very bankers and speculators who drove the country into the ground are handed trillions of dollars, with no strings attached, by the federal government. The trade unions, bound hand and foot to the ruling elite, long ago abandoned any struggle in the defense of working people.
Millions of people are losing everything—a job, a house, a decent standard of living. Tent cities have sprung up in numerous communities. Five million jobs have been destroyed since December 2007, and the new administration’s “stimulus package” will not scratch the surface of the problem.
...Even if the character of the new government is not yet grasped in a politically conscious manner, there is an increasing sense that “Nothing has changed”: the political system—sclerotic, corrupt, held in contempt—remains impervious to the interests and needs of the population.
What has not yet emerged is a revival of mass popular struggle against the attacks of the corporations and the government, and the political perspective that could guide such a struggle...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/pers-a07.shtml
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