Part 6: (conclusion—hang in there) Violence in America: Homegrown Terrorism
This whole topic has enough variables that it is necessary to review where we are at repeatedly. We now understand that chronic stress is not a good thing. We understand what body responses take place under chronic stress. We understand that these changes are best suited for the fight or flee acute situations in life, where our immediate life is at stake. Chronic stress is a whole another story. We understand that people vary genetically in their ability to handle stress. We now understand that our psychological state at the time plays a big role in just how the body will respond to a given amount of chronic stress. We have identified the 5 major psychological states which help us reduce the body response to chronic stress. We have explained why children raised in our ghetto communities are exposed to more stress, and have fewer psychological means at hand to reduce their response to these stresses. We understand the damages done to brain development during the formative years when chronic stress is not counterbalanced by enough of a psychological means to blunt the body response to this chronic stress.
We might question why this problem is more acute today, since ghettoes have existed from the formation of our country. The answer may be in how much more violence takes place in our modern ghettoes, the frequency of it, and the influence of human overpopulation. When I was younger, the affluent did not spend much time in the ghetto section of town. It was mostly because we would not feel comfortable doing so, there was nothing in a ghetto which would attract us, and they were essentially two different communities. But if you did go into a ghetto you would not fear being shot or killed—maybe you might be robbed, or at most physically assaulted to the point you would learn not to return. And that was about it. The ghetto kids were in the same schools as the rest of us and no students ever had any fears about being shot and killed in school or out of school. No kids had these fears, poor or affluent. This is not to say that violent crimes never happened. But they were rare. One huge difference now is the media influence on us day after day, all day long. We now know exactly what is going on in affluent communities and ghetto communities, not just locally but everywhere in the country. The result of this is fear, considerable amount of fear. With substantial fear, comes consequent anger. The affluent and the poor have a lot of fear and the consequent anger towards each other. Of course the affluent still outnumber the poor, but the number of poor is rising percentage-wise at an alarming rate. There are some affluent citizens who are aware of the economic injustice existing for the poor and want to share some of their own wealth to level the playing fields (Bill Gates, et al.). Other affluent people turn to rigid family values mentalities in which they seek to circle the wagons and center their concerns solely on their own well being. They are responsible for their own well being and the poor are responsible for their own well being. The answer to all the violence now everywhere, for the family values crowd—globally in fact—is to respond with more violence, more jailings, reduced government subsidies of any sort—and these ghetto inhabitants will then learn a lesson or two and behave.
The trouble is that this has never worked historically. When chaos finally comes to such societies, the poor—with nothing to lose—always win over the Have’s, with so much to protect. We have this mistaken notion that if chaos breaks out, the police and national guard will protect us, shoot all the hooligans causing a disturbance. What no one seems to realize is that when the poor have the same gadgets for endless communication, and when the number of citizens having weapons of war in their possession rises exponentially, and when everyone can now legally shoot others who they feel their lives are threatened by—well, the fact is that the police/national guard cannot be everywhere and those trying to protect their property lose. This is historically how it goes when the distribution of wealth in any society has gotten out of hand. It is a numbers game, and a mobility game. The poor can wander in mobs all over the place. The affluent are stuck defending their homes and property. The poor have no need to defend their home and property. There is little there to defend. It is not like the affluent really want their raggedy property or cheap ass possessions.
Hopefully, enough background has been established for us to now relate all of this to the children of our urban, suburban, and rural ghetto communities. In the last 15 years science has moved considerable distance to better understand the anger, frustrations, and hopelessness behind so many violent acts, individual acts upon another, or random groups, and terrorists of varied sort against all of us who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Watching violence has become some sort of acceptable entertainment. Creating senseless violence has become some sort of sport. The goal of this sport, apparently, is to kill a record number of people, especially those least likely to be able to defend themselves such as kindergarten children, church goers, patrons in movie theaters, students at colleges, gays in gay nightclubs, and so on. Most of domestic terrorist acts have been genuinely homegrown angry, disturbed individuals. Recently, foreign terrorist organizations have joined in to play the game too—right here in America, albeit Americans have so far been able to thwart most of their evil plots.
The majority of these domestic terrorists grew up in poor communities. It would be a little zany to suggest these individuals have defective genes more so than those in more affluent communities. If this were really the case we could just genetically test people for certain violent genes and then kill them before they kill others. There is ample scientific evidence that children raised in these ghetto communities grow up under chronic stress levels that can be up to tenfold that of children in affluent communities. These figures are on the average, and vary within the populations mentioned. We also know that we, as a society, have managed to make the use of senseless violence a common avenue of action for those ghetto youth frustrated, feeling hopeless, and angry. The kinds of mass killings carried out now almost on a daily/weekly basis were unthinkable 50 years ago.
This musing tries to understand why young people growing up in our poorer communities are now expressing themselves, in such large numbers, with all this violence. We know for example, that children growing up in our ghettoes have, on the average, much higher levels of glucocorticoids than children who grow up in affluent neighborhoods. We have identified some of the reasons why chronic stress hormones are so often elevated. The elevation is not minor, and major elevations occur during a period when all the body systems are maturing. Far more people who live in ghettoes end up with major depression or suffer from chronic anxiety. There is a genetic component involved, but this component is spread out among both affluent and poor neighborhoods. Much is now known about the physiology of depression and anxiety. Like all medical disorders of the brain these are neurochemical disorders in the brain itself. We cannot just get up one morning and will ourselves out of depression or anxiety. To risk an overgeneralization, it will just be mentioned that depression tends to set in when a person feels they have little control over things in their life. This creates chronic stress, and the presence of chronically elevated glucocorticoid levels which will create havoc with certain neurotransmitters, and we end up with a cognitive distortion of life that results in learned helplessness. We don’t get the results we want from trying, so trying any further is hopeless and so your life becomes joyless. It is not the purpose of this musing to go any further into the physiology of depression or anxiety. Maybe in another musing.
Back to children growing up in modern American ghettoes. When it comes to understanding the effect of chronic stress on a child during their formative years: we understand that genetics is involved, the current mental state of a child at the time of the stress is involved, and the particular environment of a particular child is involved. We know that the average level of glucocorticoids is higher in American ghetto children than in the children of more affluent communities. We know what chronic elevated glucocorticoid levels do to children in their formative years, including their health status, inhibitions on learning and memory development, their predisposition to many medical conditions of adulthood, and most germane to this topic of violence, is the impact on their emotional state. Thus, it seems self evident, with all this new scientific data on the table, that the only solution is to find ways to change their formative years environment. By adulthood the damage is done, with only limited means to rehabilitate a damaged product.
The latest studies have shown that given the same income, poor people in countries which have the greatest income inequality, have worse health. This goes back to something mentioned earlier in this musing; namely, all ghettoes are not the same in terms of the chronic stress generated. Sudanese refugees, having fled from a murderous rampage on their village and having eventually ended up in the United States, have very warm and positive recollections of their childhood in their very backward rural villages. People who are poor, and live off the land for a living, have much less stress, probably because they control their own destiny as farmers and herders. They are not reminded everyday, most of the day, how much better off others are in their, or other countries. Our American ghettoes are a breed onto themselves. If the number of children coming into adulthood in American ghettoes continues to increase exponentially, we are going to be facing a huge percentage of our citizens armed, frustrated, fearful, and angry.
To really salvage children growing up in ghetto environments we can’t eliminate all the stress, but we can concentrate on giving them good schools, good teachers, good health care, good opportunities for employment as teenagers, and a safe environment. Naturally, a safe environment is generated by all of these things mentioned in the latter sentence. That is a start, then we need address the 5 psychological defenses a child needs to lessen the stress response. I am not the best person to be too specific here but these children (and of course all children) need outlets for their frustrations. Few people want to talk about government monitoring any child raising, but the government is us, collectively. If government is not allowed to monitor child raising in some form or fashion then exactly who is to ensure kids are not being permanently damaged by their formative environment? Santa Claus? God himself? the Police? What could be a more important function of the government in any type of society than seeing to it that the field is more level for all children? While we cannot make everything equal for every child we could at least make a serious effort to ensure things are more equal. Perhaps every parent, when a child is born should be required to pass a test on child rearing or be sent to mandatory school for such a task. Parents need to understand what kind of outlets are best for a child’s frustration. With few outlets for frustration, chronic stress surges.
We need to be sure every child has sufficient social support. If they don’t, then voluntary uncles, aunts, grandparents, siblings etc, need to be found irregardless of whether a parent or parents want any help. People who have a need to parent more than two children of their own could petition to be a volunteer additional ‘parent’ for those kids most in need of assistance. Human overpopulation cannot continue. Period. With little social support in a child’s life, chronic stress surges.
We need to ensure that each child has predictable situations in their lives. This means the child understands if he/she does this or that the outcome is likely to be such and such. Of course no child has nothing but predictable situations, but their whole life cannot be filled with unpredictability. With little predictability in a child’s life, chronic stress surges.
We need to ensure that every child has some control over their daily lives. It is a disaster for any child to feel he/she has no control over anything in their life. Lack of control over our lives, is a sure fire way to make frustration reign big time. With total or little lack of control, chronic stress surges, and this ironically, applies to those affluent parents who seldom give their kids any freedom to control aspects of their own lives. Kids need some personal space.
Every child needs to gain the perception that over time things are getting better for them. When a child begins to lose all hope in their life, chronic stress surges.
We need to ensure that all teenagers have opportunities for meaningful employment.
We need to identify what is a proper minimum wage for full time employment and then have this wage rise with the cost of living, just like social security. It is short-sighted to protect the buying power of the elderly and ignore the buying power of the young.
When little or none of the above help is available to children in our ghetto areas, then why are we so shocked to see their behavior as adults be so abysmal when riots break out? Why are we screaming, “What is the matter with these people? They are behaving like animals. We give them food stamps, we give them breaks on taxes, we let them into hospital emergency rooms, we give them child support”, we find endless ways to ‘forgive’ large mortgage or tax debts, and so on. Unfortunately, for the adults in our ghettoes, it doesn’t really make much difference what we do with them now. The damage has long since been done.
This musing needs to end, but there are some things to clean up here. First, there are some amazing parents who do an amazing job meeting the needs of their kids in a ghetto. I have met many such parents. Sometimes they succeed, and the child becomes a responsible productive citizen. Sometimes, no matter how good a parent they were, the child falls in with the wrong crowd and the results go sour. Sometimes, perhaps for genetic factors, a child in a ghetto environment can actually survive on their own. Not likely, but possible. I have seen that too, not often, but not real rare either. T.O. is a remarkable example. But it comes with downsides too. Spending all one’s willpower and self focus on one aspect of our lives leaves other aspects of our lives very vulnerable. We now understand that we have limited amount of willpower and self focus.
Stopping violent behavior in America has distinct facets:
1. Using the best FBI procedures to identify potential mass killers, whether they be domestic or foreign. We have done quite well here.
2. Reducing the chronic stress levels of kids in our ghettoes
3. Enabling kids in our American ghettoes to have better psychological defenses against chronic stress.
4. Providing meaningful employment for ghetto age teenagers.
5. Providing good health care for all our citizens
6. Provide a small army of citizen volunteers to increase the social support of children in such need.
We have this prevalent delusion in America that ISIS, Al-Queda, and assorted other foreign terrorist organizations are the main threat to our societal well being. While they are threats to us, they are not the main threat. Actually, these foreign terrorist organizations attack us because we tend to get too involved in their own domestic or religious conflicts. How much, and what kind of American involvement is best seems complicated and hazy. No clear answers surface. But whether it is the number of American citizens killed, or any likely ability to implode our society here at home, it is the growing number of potential homegrown terrorists who are the real threat to social and economic health in this country. No foreign terrorist groups have any realistic chance to militarily conquer America. Any collapse is likely to be internal just as so many other historical ‘empires’ collapsed this way. The number of American citizens killed by foreign terrorist organizations, here or abroad, pales in comparison to those killed right here at home any given week—in most any of our major cities alone. The number of Americans killed by foreign terrorists this past decade is roughly 24. The number of Americans killed by guns right here in America is 280,024. Even if we add the 50 killed in Orlando recently it does little to change the numbers. So far, the indication is that this person was an American citizen acting on his own. The following is startling, so startling to me that the reader better check my math. Our odds of being killed by guns is over 11,000 times greater that it will be done by some other American citizen than by any foreign terrorist action.
Last 4th of July in Chicago alone, there were 82 shootings, and 16 deaths. Per year Chicago averages around 500 murders. In 2012 that was the most in the country. Stay away from Chicago. But wait. Murders per capita put Chicago in 21st place. Many cities, per capita are far more likely to get us murdered. Sleep with one eye open tonight.
The question arises, which I don’t have the basis to answer: Is it cheaper to jail our homegrown hooligans in our American urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes, support many on welfare, spend medical costs on all the medical conditions (mental and physical) which originate from chronic stress, provide unemployment insurance, tax exemptions, etc—or spend our money on altering the environmental conditions which doom so many of the children growing up in these ghettoes? 45 million people in the United States live below the poverty line (14.5%). 22% of all children in America live in poverty (38% of black children). These kids are growing up with elevated glucocorticoid levels from chronic stress. Can our society survive the consequences of this? Isn’t this the real smoking gun we need worry more about? In my wanderings about, as a frequent hobby of mine, I ride city buses and trains a lot. If I wandered a lot in rural ghettoes I am pretty sure I would see a lot too. These pictures from life’s other side are sad and disturbing, especially the kids. These are just little kids, trying to make sense of a world which is not only strange to them, but a world in which they often will not have the necessary psychological defenses or the genetic wear-with-all to cope with the chronic stress imposed on them. I observe them, helpless innocent enough kids, and wonder what it would be like to see them as teenagers or young adults? There is a good chance I would cross to the other side of the street. Science has given us the basis to understand this doesn’t have to be their fate. We are, in effect, generating our own demise by ignoring the plight of these children. This is a problem for all of society, and the affluent ignore these kids at the risk of the future for their own kids.
Should all kids in America be tested for resting glucocorticoid levels as a measure to determine whether they are suffering from chronic stress? The results would be predictable enough, but the question is what are we willing to do about it? For a start, allowing 2-5% of Americans to own 90% of the wealth in our country is simply unacceptable and disastrous. We need to take it away from them via tax levels on them that existed when Eisenhower was President. We cannot continue to let genetic cabals pass huge amounts of unearned wealth to their genetic offspring. The American way is for every individual to earn their own wealth. Wealth earned by an individual, upon death, should be mostly returned to the society from which it was earned so others have a chance to earn wealth too. All this huge amount of wealth being held by the top 2-5% of citizens could easily be used to help level the playing fields for all kids in all neighborhoods. The money exists aplenty but so far we are unable to tap into it. These top 2-5 percenters also use this money to control Congress and indirectly the Supreme Court. They have a bit more trouble controlling Presidential elections.
To conclude, we know what we need to do to greater ensure the vast number of kids growing up in our urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes turn out to be responsible productive citizens. Science has coughed up the answers. We know where the money is to provide the proper formative environment for all kids. Bernie Sanders sees the light and it will take a revolution for us to go after the real welfare queens in our society. Welfare means you live off of someone else’s sweat. These 2-5 percenters have created genetic cabals in which vast amounts of money get passed from those who earned wealth to those who simply inherit it. If we can just go back to the notion that the American way is for everyone to earn their wealth, then the government has enough income coming in to ensure that all kids have an opportunity to not only compete honestly to earn wealth of their own, but can actually live lives free from so much chronic stress and all the consequences that follow. It is logically amazing that major religions do not demand this. After all, what prophets ever preached that wealth should be passed on to offspring who are not part of the least fortunate in society? All prophets, to my knowledge, have always preached that it is the poor and least fortunate with whom we should share our excessive wealth. Period. Parents have an obligation to raise and support their children until they are adults. When it comes to money, that is where it ends. If a family cannot thrive as a family through their entire life with warmth and love, without receiving money through inheritance, then that family lacks any real love for each other. “Ok, mom and pop, thanks for the great job raising me in my formative years, but since I will not inherit your excess money, it’s been nice knowing you—I can’t be bothered with you anymore.” The relationship between parent and offspring as adults should have nothing to do with money. If any offspring stays close and supportive and on good terms with their parents in order to ensure an inheritance, that is disgusting and disingenuous to the pale. We need to take inheritance off the table, get money out of the picture, and then it becomes a healthy and ethical relationship right to the end.
The days are past when individual nations can control their own destiny. Too many of the most crucial problems today are global. All aspects of life are now global. Even, his Lordship Donald Trump, can’t make America great again with his blustering maniacal ego. Human overpopulation can only be controlled by global responsible reproduction. This reality is not even on the debating table. Human activities are now altering our climate. The corrective measures needed are only now beginning to be tentatively addressed, and it is probably too little too late. The working class, across the globe, can only be salvaged when there are reasonable global minimum wages. Nothing like this is even in the works, thus the bottom level working class everywhere is being relegated to poor wages, little job security, and fewer and fewer benefits. People everywhere are beginning to get on each other’s nerves, global terrorism is surging, religious wars are heating up, family values is soaring as more and more genetic families are circling the wagons and seeing those outside their own genetic cabals as forces to be feared:
“Holy Mackerel Andy—there’s something fishy here’. “We’re getting really tired of bleeding. Someone stop the world, we want to get off.” “All this damned nonsense can we stand twice or once, but sometimes always, by God, never.” “ We go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then we recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that our average state is one of being annoyed. (Quote by - Gustave Flaubert)
But on this topic of domestic violence, we can end the senseless domestic violence which is growing now at an exponential rate in our own country. We have the intellectual insight today, as a consequence of sound scientific studies, and rapid increase in neurobiological understandings, to curtail such violence. Much of recent progress is now at the molecular level, which enables us to get a more accurate picture of the science behind emotions, the formative years, and all aspects of human stress. What lags behind is the cultural will power to overcome human greed—an endemic personal/family/national/cultural/religious/political self-serving greed run amuck.
Here’s the Clunker: How much of what I have written in this musing is true or false? How much of it is good vs evil? How much of it is a contest between the Devil and God? How much of it is right or wrong? These are all terms invented by humans to make sense of ‘their’ world. Neither I or anyone else invents anything. None of us, individually, are important to the future outside of chance. We come and go---only Time stays, and the environment changes according to the laws which govern environmental change.
Whatever exists that is most useful at that point in time brings change. Progress is directional for sure, but not due to anything I, or anyone else invents. I like to say Lincoln did not engineer the demise of slavery. If he hadn’t, someone else would have. No one invented the internet. If Bill Gates had never existed all the advances in this area would have proceeded in due Time, when the environment was right. Whatever flavor of the day is most useful for the environment of the day is what will become the reality of that time. Evolutionary time is endless. There never is any rush. We are, at best, instruments of change/progress, not the inventor of change/progress. Let’s just be ridiculous here and say everything I have written comes to pass. It will have had nothing to do with me and I won’t be around to falsely claim it did. Searching for understanding is a hobby. Thinking I understand brings me contentment, changes my mental state to a more mellow state, and brings me closer to some sort of unexplainable acceptance of reality, whatever that might be. That’s the best I can do, and it took many years of a healthy retirement to even get there. When the requisite ‘rat race’ is over, then it seems, the best we can attain before, we too, make that required curtain call into an unknown eternity, is to have found some contentment in our lives. All in all, life is good theatre—seeped too much in dimly understood tragic scenes. Whenever I see or read about an endangered species it is sad, another part of eternity lost; whenever I see good people meet unthinkable ends, part of my contentment in life gets dented; whenever in my wanderings I see the end products of young adults emerging from environmentally deprived formative years, eyes projecting anger or resigned hopelessness, it makes me ever so aware of the costs implicit in the evolutionary process. Life evolves, annoyingly without us, with the requisite ‘no pain’ no gain. None of us were born self sufficient. We needed genetic luck, environmental luck, and the assistance of so many others along the way. In the end, none of us get out of this world alive. Good night Mrs. Calabash, whoever and wherever you are.
