US Violence Is Out Of Control

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here we are 50 years later, and if anything violence in and by the US has risen to even greater levels.

The murder rate in cities like Chicago and Baltimore is horrendous. You can read about the latter city here:

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2017/04/28/mayor-asking-fbi-for-help/

We're spreading violence around the globe at such an alarming rate that we're actually running out of bombs to drop on people. You can read about it here:

http://www.realcleardefense.com/2017/05/01/us_military_running_out_of_bombs_292655.html

And we're even witnessing sexual assaults by children as young as 5 or 6 years old. You can read about it here:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ap-reveals-hidden-horror-sex-assaults-12-students-47123455

And through it all we haven't learned a damn thing:

• Presidents still think violence is good foreign policy;
• Hollywood is still rewarded for filling our minds and those of our children with images of violence and filth; and
• Violent video games have become more addictive than sex, drugs, or rock and roll.

We reap what we sow, people; and sowing violence seems to have replaced baseball as our national pastime.

This will not end well.