In a more crowded environment, exercise of one person's rights and freedoms can more easily impinge on and damage the rights and freedoms of others. Hostility to the controls that protect the freedoms of all have produced the militia groups, the revived Ku Klux Klan, skin heads, and white separatists who are armed and openly advocate violence. Violence has been given a wash of respectability by politicians who live in the center of big government, enjoy lavish single-payer medical benefits, a princely retirement scheme, and who regularly brand the government as evil and oppressive. They are then shocked and outraged that a share of responsibility should be traced to them when their words are translated into action at Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Jordan, Montana. I have no solution to this worldwide problem, but I offer the thought, scarcely original with me, that violence can be viewed as an addiction.
Violent actions can give a quick, temporary sense of having effected necessary change.
There is a tendency toward irrational belief everywhere that more of the same will solve problems, whatever they might be. Violence therefore inherently tends to escalate, more's the pity. All rights reserved.