ASA 2 Section A02
Blog #5
Some of the details in "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence" by Darrell Y. Hamamoto really disturbed me on many levels. As a past member of the JROTC program of my high school, I was taught constantly of army values and came to greatly respect soldiers and veterans. It terrifies me to know that a lot of serial killers and mass murders, especially racially driven ones were in some way related to the people who are supposed to protect and serve our country. While I have heard of many cases of soldiers over in Iraq doing barbaric and inhumane things, I assumed that they were just a few bad seeds who joined the military for the sake of doing cruel things to other human beings. It never dawned on me that those bad seeds would come back to our country still holding those cruel urges within their minds and quite possibly enact them. The media always portrays soldiers as brave and admirable people who deserve our respect. They people higher up in the system use the media to veil the fact that soldiers fighting our war are still in fact murderers. To the people of the "opposing" country, we the Americans are a brute and barbaric force destroying their families and homes. Just because we do it "for a reason" doesn't make it right. By pacifying the public we are endorsing the murder. The soldiers are pardoned, sometimes awarded for killing numerous people, many who are innocent. Those who return start to believe that killing is "no big deal." There is no true peace. Even if there is no war between the countries we are still fighting a war amongst our selves, a war that has momentarily reached a stalemate.
Question: If racially driven murders aren't actually a random occurrence in society but something created from the pardoning of crimes committed during war, how can people of color (the primary
victims) ever feel safe living amongst those individuals?
No comments:
Post a Comment