We, The People Are Violent And Filled With Rage: A Nation Spinning Apart On Its Independence Day

[Purveyor]

School shootings, hatred, capitalism run amok: This 4th of July, we are in the midst of a tragic public derangement

Jim Sleeper

For centuries most Americans have believed that “the shot heard ’round the world” in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens were quickening humanity’s stride toward horizons radiant with promises never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.

The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”

That revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or under attack, or reinventing itself. It’s in prison, with no prospect of parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or we’ve sleepwalked ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012.

These shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and security systems. With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citizens, and by American soldiers at other American soldiers, inside the very institutions where republican virtues and beliefs are nurtured and defended.

They’ve been fired from within a body politic so drained of candor and trust that, beneath our continuing lip-service to republican premises and practices, we’ve let a court conflate the free speech of flesh-and-blood citizens with the disembodied wealth of anonymous shareholders. And we’ve let lawmakers, bought or intimidated by gun peddlers and zealots, render us helpless against torrents of marketed fear and vengeance that are dissolving a distinctively American democratic ethos the literary historian Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”

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http://www.salon.com/2014/07/04/we_the_people_are_violent_and_filled_with_rage_a_nation_spinning_apart_on_its_independence_day/

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[Enthusiast]

2. Kicked and recommended a thousand times!

What a great article.

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3. The media teaches violence and rage

The story of we the people is done very well, the author Jim Sleeper articulated many issues that penetrate directly to the ascension in the American dream.

This self-awareness from his view is not a happy journey. From my view a lot of people often said that it will not be an easy journey.

Jim Sleeper has a way with words that describes that journey. However there is always a solution or better results are possible. That is the reasoning I would like to master.

Yes, the derangement is the Media, Hollywood, Cable and Satellite now interactive television, connected as never before with leadership in government.

Actually it appears the media it the real whistleblower. Sounding through commercials, wild news breaks, Hollywood movies, or serial dramas attracting role playing like social living as never experienced before with the protection by the first amendment.

This new communications is impacting society as severe as was the first printed book about the word of God.

The word of God written by inspiration from the divine providence channeled by monarchy undivided rule or absolute sovereignty by a single person. Is that where this notion of too big to fail spawned, isn’t that that original one percent society.

Profiteering at its finest done through centuries plundering resources for personal reasons, whimsical decisions that only benefit the few. War endlessly by misunderstanding what is dominion, power, or authority of a sovereign; that is royalty, or todays paradox we the people question as to how eminent domain is reflected in society.

Now, via the Internet were thousands of minds can sift through massive amounts of ideas. Giving a very obvious signal that laws in society are not moving good enough to achieve life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Today it is found through simple observation our Congress and those elected feel and work in the incredible corrupting power Kings have always enjoyed through time.

Then to honestly think the abundance of life is going to be equally shared instantly is an intellectual paradox. However many young minds cannot wait.

It takes time to bake the pie, cut it, and serve it, especially when thirteen colonies cast the original law based on agriculture now have to stretch that reasoning with new thing called technology to fifty colonies.

This expansion is a growth rate that spells success however Jim Sleeper does illustrate the very important expenses, the life liberty and happiness our young show us.


“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

― Emma Lazarus

I weep for those children in Texas…or those with no documentation millions invited in political games to work under the lamp of poverty. Now America has more children to tell us a story while the media plays the game.

[newfie11]

4. K&R

I fear for other countries. We have an appalling record in manipulating countries to suit our oligarchs.

[pretzel4gore]

5. the Buddha teaches

You aint punished FOR your sins, but you are punished BY the sin! Iow, Jesus dying on the cross to take away our sins blah blah blah, beside the point...somehow or other, however, the religion consumed by the consumer in the most successful political economic entity of all time, hides the fact there's no logic in getting away with doing bad... Buddha teaches that the universe is made up of what happens within it; and Time is a relentless fact nothing can 'revise' (and that's good, because that means trying to be honest, trying not to kill jackasses who need killing etc, and always being there for life itself even when walking away is so easier, was not only the best moral choice but overall a basic necessity for 'Nirvana' (if one is so blessed)....it has been noticed by everybody who has ever lived that looking out for number one meant looking out for number 2 though it seems only people on their deathbed say that aloud! The reactionary right is evil, and it has WORKED at snuffing out the Revolution. That's what happened. They succeeded. But
Nothing fail like success when you're working for the Devil.
Question is; why do I feel responsible? Im not. Ive been against fascism since reagan. i even sent money to blahblahblah