To think that we should get to the source of violence is correct; education, a dignified well paying job, and a sense of belonging to a vibrant society are essential for social health. However, given where we are this is only an ideal. Let's say you had an opportunity to create a world class educational system and did not lack funds or resources. Instead, you decide to spend those resources on luxury items, and meanwhile, your kids grow up to be veritable ignoramuses. It comes time to select a leader, and everyone must make a choice, as your country is facing an emergency. However, no one has enough knowledge or background on what to do. Someone arises who can document her/his experience and knowledge, but this person is ruthless and has no ethics. Your options are almost zero because you failed to take those critical initial steps to get the kids educated. Well, what we are facing now is a situation resulting from our failure to become educated and act in a responsible manner at the voting booth. Instead of becoming educated and participating in the selection process, we have "let George do it", and this literally and figuratively is what has happened. This also is what happened in Germany in the 1920s.
Now, the U.S. is at a precipice, where we have bought into all the corporatist lies, starting with the 1920s and the Palmer raids, all the way through the 1950s with McCarthyism, and now with the nonsense being shoved in front of us by the likes of Murdoch and Fox News. Look about you. You have massive unemployment, a crumbling infrastructure, debt spiraling out of control, and a dumbed down population, all ingredients in a recipe used by the corporatists to maintain their lethal grip on the people. That they were able to get away with the bankster bailout, Wall Street scams, these insane wars, and other chicanery without criminal prosecution evidences this.
As the empire continues to deteriorate, one can expect a rise in violence but a corresponding rise in the corporatist response: violence. Thinking that we will return to reason and negotiation is idealism at best and naivete or stupidity at worst
It is quite quite correct to say that we need alternatives to violence, but that should have been creating those decades ago by addressing and supporting education, instead of imperialist wars and subsidies for the rich. Now, because of our ethos - the lack of values, preferring consumerism, selfishness, greed, entertainment", business, and sports, we have to pay the piper. This is the tragedy that the German people faced in 1932, and it is the one we are facing today. Remember Caberet? I think it is going to be what Hobbes referred to in hi Leviathan as a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; we have only ourselves to thank. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once said said that reason has to work itself out in history, and we are about ready to be taught that lesson.
Whether we learn anything is up to us; wee need to be receptive to ideas outside the ideology with which people have been brainwashed by the corporatists. This means alternative political economies, but above all, it means what Aristotle and Plato told us 2500 years ago, that only an educated populace can sustain a participatory society. For now, however, it has to be the capacity to defend ourselves against a power which people have allowed to grow out of control.
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