This is still the unnoticed insanity haunting the
American news cycle, whether the story being reported is domestic or
international. As a society, we’re armed and dangerous – and always at war,
both collectively and individually. We’re endlessly declaring bad guys
(officially and unofficially) and endlessly protecting ourselves from them, in
the process guaranteeing that the violence continues. And the parallels between
“them” and “us” are unnerving.
Mohammad Abdulazeez opened fire at a naval reserve
training facility in Chattanooga and killed five people. He was suffering from
depression and possibly radicalized by ISIS. Fox News headlined the story:
“Tennessee gunman was armed to the teeth and ready for war with America.” The
story pointed out that he was a naturalized American citizen born in Kuwait.
A few days later, a gun shop owner in Florida
posted a video on YouTube declaring, with the Confederate flag in the
background as he spoke – summoning the spirit of Dylann Roof’s murder last
month of nine African-Americans in Charleston, S.C. – that his store, Florida
Gun Supply in Inverness, was now a “Muslim-free zone.”
Ray Mabus, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, spoke of the
shootings with less clarity about the nature of the enemy: “While we expect our
sailors and Marines to go into harm’s way, and they do so without hesitation,
an attack at home, in our community, is insidious and unfathomable.”
Yet a few days later at least 10 Afghan soldiers –
American allies – died “at home, in their community” when the checkpoint they
were manning in eastern Afghanistan was taken out in a U.S. helicopter strike,
which the Afghan regional commander described as “a very big mistake.” He
pointed out to the Washington Post that the strikers should have known they
weren’t attacking the enemy because it happened in daylight and “the
Afghanistan flag was waving on our post, when we came under attack.”
Well, you know, these things happen. But somehow
the deaths of these soldiers didn’t cause the same stir the Chattanooga
killings did, though the victims’ lives were equally precious and were cut
short in an attack that probably seemed, to them, equally unfathomable. But,
whereas the Chattanooga shootings were a “horrific attack,” the friendly fire
killings were an “incident” – just like all the other bomb and missile
killings, accidental, intentional or whatever, of civilians in Afghanistan,
Iraq and elsewhere over the last decade and a half. We have no real security, just a massive power
to retaliate. This is the nature of armed self-defense.
As I wrote several years ago, speaking of the
“moral injury” that so many vets bring home from their war service: “Killing is
not a simple matter. It’s not a joke. The argument can be made that on occasion
it’s necessary, but military killing is not about self-defense. Soldiers are
trained to kill on command, and this is done not simply through physical
preparedness exercises but through dehumanization of the enemy: a cult of
dehumanization, you might say. Turns out we can’t dehumanize someone else
without dehumanizing ourselves.”
And the more that people lose touch with their own
humanity, the more, I fear, they will feel the need to be armed – desperately
imagining it’s the same thing as being secure. And the news cycle will
continue, endlessly bringing us more of the same. [Abridged]
Robert
Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/23/armed-insecurity-age-endless-war-and-mass-shootings
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