By Farouk Araie
Cape Town - The brutal killing of a young black youth who accidentally pressed the wrong door bell graphically illustrates how cheap black lives are in the US.
Its streets are paved with gold and slick with blood. They enjoy liberty to an unparalleled degree, yet they display lethal behaviour at home and abroad.
The US has been at war with itself and the rest of the world since its founding.
Unilateral global intervention and brutal internal warfare is an accurate description of the US today. Its violent history lends the country unique characteristics that matter when considering questions of how to unhitch its future from its violent DNA.
Innocent people are being massacred across the US heartland because an ambiguous outdated constitutional law empowers citizens to own guns.
It is a sad reality, because politicians are beholden to the gun lobby. The latest racial murder has turned the US into “the land of the deranged and the home of the fearful”.
Violence is now part of the American way of life, from womb to tomb. It has been pervasive from that country’s earliest day’s, almost 400 years ago.
The US was conceived and nurtured by violence, and they are entertained by it, with 200 million guns at their disposal.
It was D H Lawrence who once said: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.”
In it’s relations with the outside world,the gun has become the drone, the bullet has become the cruise missile.
With elections looming in 2024, prominent politicians are crawling to the National Rifle Association (NRA) for votes and endorsements.
The NRA and it’s horde of gun nuts continually crow that its not guns that kill people, but people who kill people. During the 20th century alone 10 million Americans were the victims of violent crimes, and 10% of them or 1 089 616 were murdered between 1900 and 1997.
More Americans were killed by other Americans during the 20th century, exceeding American deaths in the past six wars.
The situation arises today because of an obsolete and currently stupid inclusion in the US constitution of a “right to bear arms”, a right that no longer makes any sense except to people who make money selling guns.
The unsavoury truth is that the US is a lawless land.
Cape Times
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