Rage
America has become a society of rage
This rage is driven by racism, political divisions, cultural differences, and for-profit industries that promote violence.
The evening news on one local channel in San Antonio recently led with three stories about road rage, one involving a promising young college student.
Stories appearing in Yahoo News over the past weekend carried reports about current and former sports figures arrested for violent behavior.
Our society has become so infested with rage that too many athletes feel that violence, whether mimic or actual, enhances their “brand.”
In other words, they are not “for real” unless they can shoot a gun like they shoot a basketball or hit their partners like they hit baseballs.
Rage seeps into the very fabric of society. It stains and ultimately rots the threads that hold the society together.
A 16-year-old Black teenager—the kind of kid everyone would be proud to have as a son—mistakenly walked up to the house of an 84-year-old White man in Kansas City looking for his brother and was shot, and seriously wounded, by the embittered racist old White man. The Black kid survived; the old White man went to jail.
The incident has triggered a “national discussion” about race in America—especially after it was reported that three White families refused to help the wounded young Black teenager seeking assistance.
Rage leads to some White people in our military betraying our county to declared enemies who are not only encouraged but actually praised for their traitorous actions by lunatic right-wing Congressional leaders.
That is the fabric of our rage-driven American society today.
So, if a young college student or a person of different color cuts off an already pissed off driver, he (much more often than a she) feels he has a license to shoot and kill the offending driver with one of the dozens of guns he keeps handy for such a moment.
In Texas, White men, especially those with former military or law enforcement backgrounds, have a license to either run over or shoot to kill any Black Lives Matter protestors that stand in his way.
In Ohio, White police officers can shoot an unarmed Black man 46 times for a traffic violation without any accountability.
More than half of all murders committed in the U.S. each year are committed in the South—the former Confederate States of America. Most of those murders are not committed by “bad guys” with a gun but rather by “good guys” with a gun who let their rage make them feel they have a license to kill.
Rage is a cancer in society. It awakens the worse demons in all of us. And it will consume our society.