Part 2 : Violence in America: Homegrown Terrorism
Most people are aware that when a severe crisis happens, a standard stress response occurs. If we are running away from a lion, stress responses occur which automatically stimulate our body to release energy stores, increase our heart rate, increase blood pressure and breathing to get more energy and oxygen to our muscles quickly. Many body systems, involved in short term matters, are inhibited—such as the digestive system, the immune system, growth, tissue repair, and reproduction. To keep better focus on the forest for the sake of the trees, the mechanisms involved here will not be gone into. Everything that happens during our stress response is very important If we are in immediate physical danger. In most animals, these extreme physical dangers are about the only time the stress response is activated. However, we humans have serious potential problems here. We generate concerns and anxiety about of a lot of things via daily mental activity. However, if there is no physical threat imminent, our stress response is not a good thing. When the stress response is not triggered by physical danger, then we are dealing with anxiety, neurosis, hostility, and paranoia. If this is happening often, then we are exposing ourselves to long term medical effects, which can be mental and physical.
Chronically stimulating our storage sites to release energy stores can lead to diabetes. And chronically increasing our heart rate, blood pressure and inhibiting growth, tissue repair, reproduction etc. can exact medical conditions down the road. These conditions can include memory problems, learning process damage, depression, anxiety disorders, a whole array of digestive disorders, anger disorders, and many other assaults on body homeostasis.
We also need to be reminded that the ways in which our given genes operate, are affected by our environments, including the womb. Bluntly put, the degree to which we can ever become productive, responsible and personable citizens depends heavily on the environment in which we grow up in during our formative years. It becomes very difficult to change behavior (mentality) in adults. Yet this is the path we have chosen for those who live in our ghettoes. When they become incorrigible bad-behavior citizens, we are aghast and turn to punishment as a corrective measure. This rarely works and we either end up with dangerous people who need to be locked up, or more harmless forlorn people who often have given up all hope, and just exist to survive. When the percentages of people in this category were small, life just got better and better for the rest of us. But now the percentages of the poor in American ghettoes have grown, as the size of these kind of ghettoes have increased and spread. Not only that, but these incorrigibles now have all kinds of electronic devices to communicate with each other. Local riots are almost certain to become (in the future) organized rolling riots that alternate with each other in order to spread out the police or national guard. The police cannot be everywhere at once. Soon the rioters will appear wherever the police or guard are not. This may start happening sooner than we expect. If this sounds more like a third world country in action, it actually is. But we, of course, don’t like to think it possible that we could become Baghdad West almost overnight. That happenstance only happens in the many other countries now experiencing just this sort of societal chaos. Or so we foolishly think.
Just the economic cost of providing inadequate income safety nets is becoming insufferable. When 43% of our citizens no longer make enough money to qualify to pay federal income taxes, well—we have a huge dent in how much tax money the government even gets. We are now faced with the consequences of our past decisions about schools, health care, employment opportunities, how we handled recreational drug abuse, job benefits, and community safety.
Frankly, there is no immediate solution. Many of the adults in these communities are beyond help. If we treated the children in these communities properly today, the results would not be seen for another 20 years. Americans can’t wait that many years. In addition, there are numerous other global problems facing humanity today, and almost all of them cannot be fixed overnight either. Human foresight is not an inherent characteristic which has kept pace with our greed for ‘things’ of all sorts. We prefer to deny science, and cling to anecdotal notions to justify why these global problems like human overpopulation, climate change, and human violence are overblown, and thus, we simply concentrate on our immediate well being; and if we are my age, we say a prayer of thanks that we will be dead when all this shit hits the fan. Of course we remain amazingly disingenuous about it all and say, and actually mean, we want our grandchildren to have a better life. Yet we know, for example, that when the next opportunity to invade some country arises, we will borrow the money to do so—let the grandchildren and paid mercenary soldiers pay the price for the invasions. Not surprisingly the next generation declines to pay off the previously acquired debts either. So we go deeper into debt—all the while insisting we want our grandchildren to have a good future. Part 3 to Follow
