What has our Country become?

[emilyg]

Cleveland Man Pummeled to Death by 15, Urinated On and Stripped in the Street
Monday, May 12, 2008

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CLEVELAND — Even by tough, urban crime standards it was a grisly attack: Up to 15 people chased a man, then kicked and beat him to death on the street. Before police arrived, one attacker urinated on the victim's head.

By the time Charles Gooden Jr., 41, took his final steps, the crime-hardened neighborhood had awakened and two people, talking in matter-of-fact tones, reported a man down, his clothes being dragged off.

"You got a male being assaulted by 15 other guys. He's laying on the street," one 911 caller said.

It happened before dawn on April 27 on a street within a 10-minute drive of the city's skyscrapers, sports venues and tourist attractions, but across a chasm of poverty and crime in the most murder-ridden neighborhood in one of America's poorest cities.

Latangia Anderson, 23, Johnny Brown, 20, and Paris Moore, 19, all of Cleveland, have been charged with aggravated murder and each pleaded not guilty Monday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. Bond was set at $1 million for each.

The defendants said they were unable to afford an attorney and had lawyers appointed to represent them. The attorneys



http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,355235,00.html

[ColbertWatcher]

1. A country desensitized to violence by war. n/t

[emilyg]

2. Yes. Don't forget the media.

[John Q. Citizen]

3. Yep, we have leaders who vote for war, vote for torture, vote for capital punishment,

and then we are shocked when people think violence is the solution to whatever their problem happens to be.

[ben_meyers]

5. Possibly, but which war?

Revolutionary, Whiskey Rebellion, war of 1812, Civil War, Spanish American, WW1, WW2, Korea, Viet Nam, Panama, Somalia, Gulf War 1, Afghanistan, Iraq or what am I leaving out? I wonder if we haven't been at war more than not.

[tom_paine]

7. I think the unjust immoral ones, the person is saying, corrode a nation's soul.

Which would probably include Vietnam, Panama (not so much because Noriega was innocent, but because he was the Bushies' cocaine trafficking pal until he started skimming too much or whatever finally caused them to take out their Old Friend and Accomplice PumpkinFace) and the Iraq Invasion.

I understand your point. That wars have happened and likely always will happen. Please undersand what I believe to be the poster above's point. That it is the truy and wholly IMMORAL wars (not just the slightly questionable ones that are controversial, like Korea, which I ahppen to agree with) which trigger negative changes in National Psyche.

[Indenturedebtor]

9. I disagree, and it's not the videogames either

Crime is pretty much proportional to social inequity... for both the obvious reasons and toss in too many hours worked with too little time spent raising kids and this is what you get.

Imagine growing up in a neighborhood where to survive "honestly" you have to work 2 jobs and ride the bus for 3 hours a day to get to and between them. You'll never get "ahead", you'll never retire, you probably wont live to see 50. You have no real access to education, you have no real prospects for the future. Why bother?

Every country I've ever been to has shockingly violent TV. But they don't have shocking high violent crime rates. And yes many of them were extremely socially diverse.

[ColbertWatcher]

11. I think the GOP-controlled media has some responsibility in this...

...not video games or songs (that's always been a chicken-egg thing).

But, with revelations about the GOP's Pentagon Propaganda ring, you cannot deny the GOP-controlled media didn't push the idea of war all the time.

Watch the TV looking for military messages. I remember a commercial for a cruise line that used the regimentation of vacationers. (There are so many other examples)

Add to that the fact that the American public is being anesthetized to the consequences of war. The injured are hidden away along with the flag-draped caskets.

The social inequity is the deep-rooted cause, but the GOP-controlled media isn't helping when they don't report truthfully about the economy or when they report dishonestly about why we invaded Iraq.

[Lint Head]

4. In a fascist state violence is common, tolerated and entertaining.

:dem:

[tom_paine]

6. Exactly. What else is the show COPS for?

The proliferation of such shows, all makign entertainment out of the misery of others, surely should have been a sign to us long ago that something was going very wrong with our National Psyche.

I'd be lying if I said I saw it at the time. I mean, the whole COPS genre of entertainment-from-real-life-suffering did make me sit up and take notice, but I had no idea what I was seeing, which was some of the first steps (or perhaps the middle steps; this may have been quite a long time in coming) of our National Psyche become attuned to the dictates of totalitarianism/fascism/whatever we choose to call this new form of government Bush and Putin have created.

[Kaleko]

8. It's a country where exploitation is admired and hailed as "good business"

as long as the perpetrators can get away with it. That includes promoting slavery, even genocide.

[RedCappedBandit]

10. "What has our Country become?"

Fascist.