Infected.

Editor,

The instrument that pervades Americans' thinking about how to resolve conflict is violence.

There are many reasons this is true, but the fact is that retribution, revenge, summary justice, kill-or-be-killed so thoroughly permeate the American psyche that few Americans give it much reflective thought.

Here in Canada a person who commits a crime is viewed as a troubled individual; the posture of society as a whole is to extend an understanding hand to find ways to strengthen that person's relationships with society.

In the U.S. innocent people who did nothing are shot 40 times by scared cops, people who commit crimes are handed over to private prisons to be brutalized, certain prisoners are killed.

American cops wear body armor, carry heavy weaponry, beat protesters over the head.

American diplomats threaten "force."
American presidents send drones.

The nature of violent thinking, similarly to racist thinking, is to so permeate a culture it infects that those infected by it are utterly blind to it in themselves or the institutions they rely on.

Re: "A Ghastly Ritual Repeats Itself" (9/19/2013)