Official reaction to the March 6th student-on-student violence at Massabesic High School followed the well-worn script in its portrayal of shock and dismay over a (video-taped) beating on school grounds. Characterizing the “resort to violence” as “both disturbing and dangerous,” Superintendent John Davis insisted (in the Journal Tribune,) “It is not how we resolve our differences.”
This reminded me of then-President Bill Clinton’s pontifications following the 1999 Columbine school shootings. He urged the Colorado crowd to “give us a culture of values instead of a culture of violence.” This as he was bombing the snot out of the former Yugoslavia. Reviewing that campaign of savagery ”“ now so commonplace that it elicits not a peep from the “Indispensable Nation’s” distracted population ”“ Human Rights Watch (HRW) counted approximately 500 civilian deaths. Other estimates of course were much higher. Even HRW however, questioned the bombing of Belgrade’s radio and TV station, other civilian targets such as the Marshall Tito Bridge, and the New Belgrade Heating Plant, all in dense urban settings.
Mr. Clinton was of course, concurrently bombing Iraq on a nearly daily basis while simultaneously prosecuting a vicious sanctions campaign against the people of Iraq resulting in roughly 5,000 “excess deaths” of Iraqi children per month: A policy that former UN officials have bluntly characterized as genocidal.
Back in the 1840s, Illinois Representative Abraham Lincoln could speak clearly against war and “military glory ”“ that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood.” Nobody of note speaks so plainly today.
Though it may have escaped official notice locally, the U.S. is currently prosecuting a number of “wars of opportunity.” These increasingly feature drone-enabled extra-judicial murder directed from the White House on “Terror Tuesdays.” Mr. Obama routinely selects the soon-to-be-pulped from a supplied Kill List: Known officially as “The Disposition Matrix.”
In a country that spends more than half its discretionary budget annually on the military, that glorifies war, warfare, and “warriors,” (and at a school housing a Junior ROTC program) the claim that we abjure a “resort to violence” is the worst kind of cynical bunkum. Apparently it’s presumed that guileless children will take officialdom at its word rather than its deeds.
Richard Rhames, Biddeford
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