North America Since 1960: A Continuous Flow of Violence
By: Shoshana Kaufman
Tags: Violence, History, America, War, Society

North America Since 1960: A Continuous Flow of Violence

Photo by Elias Arias on Unsplash

I was born in 1960. I’ve lived through a lot of American history. I don’t remember the Kennedy assassination but I remember the moon landing very well. Growing up, I saw a lot of Vietnam war coverage. I remember seeing the iconic photograph of Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm attack. I was disturbed and confused and my mother had to explain napalm to me.

When I was in grade four, the seventies began. The sixties were over, but their message of love and peace lived on. Society, however did not fully internalize that message and the seventies continued as violently as the sixties had been, but without all the idealistic music.

The seventies was my decade of being bullied. It was a violent, insensitive time. Concern for mental and emotional health was mostly nonexistent. People with psychological issues were more or less told to suck it up. Kids who were bullied were “bringing it on themselves” or were “too sensitive.” Teachers turned a blind eye and parents were oblivious. Especially if their kid was the bully.

My parents abused me physically and I think kids at school sensed my air of victimization and bullied me. I did not feel safe enough around my parents to confide in them about the bullying, so I suffered in silence.

I recently watched a seventies film I had never heard of called Wake in Fright. It’s a horror film about an Australian teacher in a small outback town to travels to another town during summer vacation and gets caught up in a sick cycle of gambling and drinking. The climactic scene is a horrific kangaroo massacre that was filmed at an actual kangaroo massacre. But that wasn’t even the worst part of the film for me. The worst part were the scenes of everyday life from the seventies: drinking, partying, mindless sex, materialism, ugly décor, and overall a total lack of authentic human emotion.

For me, the climax of the seventies experience came right in the middle of the decade. It was just about a month after the end of the Vietnam War: May 28, 1975. A sixteen-year-old student at my school brought in a rifle, shot and killed his English teacher, sprayed some bullets around randomly, killing one other student, and then killed himself by blowing off his own head.

That horrifying incident occurred on a Wednesday. The school was closed for the rest of the week and on Monday morning we were back in class. As I walked through the halls after that life-changing day, I noticed there were bullet holes in some of the lockers on the first floor. Other students saw blood stains on the floor of one of the washrooms.

There was no trauma team to help students process the tragedy. We were expected to just suck up our emotions and get on with our materialistic lives. Later generations of students at that school were told that the story of the shooting was just a myth.

No one could bear to talk about it.

Life went on and I went to another school the next year. Few of us remembered the shooting from the old school and my conscious mind forgot about it.

The violence of our culture went on as an undercurrent in an increasingly materialistic society that came to a climax in the 1980s. Ronald Regan was elected president of the United States in 1980 and Margaret Thatcher had been elected British prime minister the year before. Together, they defined a decade that ruthlessly promoted the needs of capital and business and just as ruthlessly oppressed the needy and vulnerable. Social services were for losers. Healthcare was for the wealthy and deserving.

Violent conflicts involving the United States and/or Britain have been continuous from that time. Dictators like Pinochet were propped up and death squads in places like El Salvador were supported by governments funded by the U.S. and Britain.

Thousands of people were disappeared, imprisoned, tortured, killed, and raped and the so-called civilized world looked the other way.

People like social activist Noam Chomsky and film maker Oliver Stone railed against this reality and continuously denounced their country’s complicity in crimes against humanity, but most people never heard these voices. They were drowned out by the voices of materialism and egoism that were the only ones most people could hear. Getting ahead in a viciously competitive and grasping society has obsessed several generations since the 1960s.

You know the ending to this story. Today we have Brexit, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump. We have an out-of-control global pandemic. Most Americans have either no health insurance or unaffordable for-profit insurance. America is once again experiencing a surge of public violence and gun sales have seen an alarming increase since the pandemic arrived in North America.

Are we sick of this yet? Are we ready for change?

I will end this article with a little morality tale that has its roots in my high school experience. At my new high school, I took drama for the first time. The teacher, Mrs. Harrison was inspiring. She got everyone excited about theatre arts classes and the school play, which she directed every year. She got to know her students personally and was beloved by all who knew her. She inspired me to become a teacher.

Bridgit Harrison was an unusually open-minded person for the middle-class suburbia she lived and worked in in the 1970s. She was a White woman married to a Black man. This was no secret at my school. This was a school that was 99.0% White. The only two Black students dated each other. We loved Bridgit even more for this. She accepted all of us, whether we were White, Black, Asian, Brown, or LGBTQ.

Bridget and her husband Bill could not have children so they adopted a little Black boy named Caleb. I met him when he was five. He was adorable. Their family life seemed perfect.

Caleb grew up with issues, however. He had learning disabilities and suffered from Tourette Syndrome. He later developed a problem with alcohol.

As an adult, he married a woman he met at the store where he worked and they had two sons. Their marriage was destroyed when Caleb killed someone in a drunk driving incident and was sentenced to nine months in jail.

His wife left him and they spent several years fighting over custody of the two boys. She remarried. She and her new husband had several more children together. They did not want to deal with the Harrisons’ interference in their family life. As far as they were concerned, all of the children belonged to them.

But Bridget kept fighting to see her grandsons. At one point Caleb won sole custody.

That’s where the story gets violent. Caleb’s wife’s new husband showed up at their house when only Bill was at home. He strangled him to death and he and his wife and the children disappeared the next day.

Incredibly, the police ruled the death as due to “natural causes.” No charges were laid.

About a year later, the husband showed up at Bridget’s house and strangled her and threw her down the stairs. Her death was labeled “suspicious.” Again, no charges were laid against the obvious suspects.

Three years after that, Caleb was strangled in his bed in the same house. This finally got the Police’s attention. Caleb’s former wife and her husband were charged and later found guilty of all three murders.

How does this terrible story relate to what I am writing about? It’s almost an allegory for the way our society sees violence as a solution to every problem. Another country shows signs of becoming communist or socialist? You don’t want your population getting any ideas about universal healthcare? Invade that country and kill as many people as necessary to destroy that inconvenient ideology. Your population is sick of endless involvement in foreign conflicts? Just secretly give funding to violent regimes to do the dirty work for you under the guise of “foreign aid.” Your ex-husband wins custody of your children? Get your new husband to kill the entire family!

The meaning of the allegory is that violence trickles down from the top to the bottom of a society. A society that allows bullying and the abuse of children that oppresses the poor, that allows racism, sexism, and homophobia to flourish, is one that indulges in violence against the entire world. Against the environment. That is willing to blow up the entire planet to prove a point.

This is where we are now. We need to be completely done with this destructive ideology. And that will mean sacrifice: of our freedom (to fight the pandemic), of our addiction to violence (including gun control), and of our insatiable materialistic and egoistic desires (to stop the destruction of the planet).

The seeds of violence were in Brampton, Ontario in the 1970s and many other North American small towns. They flourished in the hedonism and greed of the 1980s. They flowered in the many world conflicts of the 1990s. They threaten to destroy democracy in the 2020s. Human civilization is in trouble.

Denial will not help: of the pandemic or of the violent fabric of modern life. Now is the time to do something before it is too late.

The defeat of Donald Trump would be a good start.