Week 5: Bryan Ngo, A01

Week 5:

Bryan Ngo

ASA 002

A01

Unfortunate as it is, mass killings have become a part of our Western society’s characteristics and it has been for many, many decades. According to Hamamoto in “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence”, the only difference between mass killings then and now are the motives behind the killers. These motives, again according to Hamamoto, shifted form purely economical motives to motives filled with hate and revenge on a certain group of people. It’s still a very strange idea to me; the idea that someone can, and will, single out a certain type of person based on factors such as race or physical appearance and generalize hate to all individuals of that group. In the many examples of mass killers provided by Hamamoto, the victims always fell under some sort of categorization based on the previously mentioned factors. It’s puzzling as to why those groups are singled out, but we do know that most of the mass killers had some sort of background with armed forces. Many of these targeted groups are, unfortunately, individuals with some Asian background (this is true for a handful of the mass killers after wars against opposing Asian forces). Unfortunate as it is, there reason’s to believe that these mass killings on race are a blowback of diversity in Western culture. It’s an understandably strange feeling for military personnel to fight an enemy over seas, only to come home and find the same type of person as neighbors in their homeland.

Question:

As stated in my last sentence, I do agree that it’s strange for military personnel to fight enemies from some culture, only to come back to find the same type of people as their neighbors. So what steps can/should be taken to mitigate this strange feeling that comes from the transition of military life to civilian life?

References:

Glover, L. (2017, August 07). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Statistics for Veterans. Retrieved October 21, 2017, from https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/ptsd-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-statistics-veterans/

Hamamoto, D. Y. (n.d.). Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence . Retrieved October 21, 2017.