Can Pandemic Violence Be Pacified?

How can so many not see it? Violence everywhere, whether expressed as racism, genocides, wars, school or mass shootings, police beatings, domestic abuse, bullying—if it’s acceptable in movies, games, & other “entertainment”, why shouldn’t it be acceptable in real life?

Desensitization happens throughout one’s childhood until the border between games & reality vanishes. The military helps spread it through its barbaric training which creates killers by stripping recruits of any sense of individuality or personal responsibility—the country made me do it! The understanding with anyone upon enlistment or being drafted, if that is done, is that lifelong trauma counseling will be available upon exit, along with sizeable compensation.

The martial arts have turned violence into play, or even “spirituality”! What a sick concept of spirituality. The only marshal art I have any respect for is aikido which never initiates a move but uses the energy of the attacker’s assault to propel the attacker to his own demise.

It often feels like it’s too late to save ourselves from the collapse of civil order, international peace, or climatic cataclysm. The beginning of the end was launched by Cowboy Reagan in 1980, & now the guns need to be worn ready at the hip. I saw it coming & left to save myself. Standing & fighting is not a reality when faced by moronic psychopaths. Sadly, they can be found in most neighborhoods. There are only a few smaller countries left which are not run or dominated by them.

I closely relate to those Russians who are leaving, or are planning to leave, their country because of the sense of hopelessness they feel about what their country is doing to Ukraine, their own soldiers, the rest of the Russian people, & the entire future of Russia. I felt likewise in the U$ in 1980 when Reagan came into office & undid the progress of the previous several decades towards justice, racial equality, women’s & gay rights, worker salaries & workplace safety, & so much more within a few months of taking office.

Can the world survive the Wild West & other psychopaths—Putin, Modi, MoJo, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orban, etc.? I seriously doubt it. If anyone survives, it will likely be small isolated communities in Patagonia or other difficult-to-access areas where people can live in communities whose members are not inundated with the dehumanizing alienating elements of the modern urban rat race which sets individuals up against one another without forethought of distant consequences.

To pull our asses out of the fire, we must eliminate the competition now mandatory in every sphere of life along with spendthrift consumerism & schooljail systems of indoctrination, the primary pushers of parasitic corporatism. Anything which tears us apart or allows any waste of resources fuels the wealth & power of the psychopaths who are doing as they please in a world spinning into complete chaos with no sense of purpose or direction.

Fleeing to Alaska did not work because I became, in the eyes of the Native Americans with whom I worked, a representative of the occupying force.

Moving to my parents’ homeland in Eastern Europe in 1994 & becoming an EU citizen has been one of very few identities of which I have been proud because the EU, though it has enormous problems, has been a massive accomplishment considering the violence this subcontinent had seen in the previous several centuries, especially in the 1st ½ of the 20th.

Europe’s unresolved & increasing minority issues are a primary threat to its stability: anti-Semitism is still in evidence, the feelings against the Roma are strong, & the intolerance for African & Middle Eastern refugees can be jarring. Here in Lithuania, even college profs are often among the most nationalistic & anti-Semitic &, even more so, anti-Roma & anti-immigrant.

Many neighboring nations still find it hard to accept one another at times, but international exchange programs like Erasmus, which encourage the exchange of college students & faculty, are having stupendous unifying effects. Lithuania, for example, recently reported that as many as 10% of its citizens are either married to or living with someone who is not Lithuanian.

Lithuanian universities overflow with students from southern Asia, Africa, & throughout Europe. It’s a wonderful sight to behold, but it too has its glitches & soft spots. I have often heard Lithuanian men complain that they are losing their women to foreigners, something that leaves many insecure men, especially those less formally educated, feeling demeaned & mentally or emotionally castrated.

Only by purposely teaching collaborative values & eliminating the prevalence of competition everywhere one turns can the trend be halted, reversed.

The words of a wise little boy in South Africa should be considered & heeded. A western anthropologist observing children in a South African native community decided to try an experiment. Seeing a group of boys playing in a field, he placed a basket full of fruit under a tree at the opposite end of the field from where the boys were playing. Going over to the boys, he told them that there was a basket of fruit at the other end of the field & that the 1st one who got to it could have it.

Stepping back to not get trampled, he was astounded—no one ran! The boys 1st grasped each other’s hands & leisurely, as a group, they ran across the field, sat in a circle around the basket, & divided up the fruit. As they snacked, the anthropologist asked them why not one of them had wanted to be the 1st in order to get all the fruit. One boy answered: “If one of us is unhappy, then all of us are unhappy.”

This account needs to be recalled next time a school or other mass shooting occurs—as long as one person is unhappy, no one is safe. Mutual happiness can be obtained only on a communal level. Individual greed & someone driving to be #1 are what leads to the repeated tragedies the U$ will be incapable of comprehending as long as being #1, a winner, the best is held up as a desirable goal.

© Vytas Stoskus, 2022