An Evolving Cult of Violence

The escalation of the cult of violence as represented by stark violent events from Syria and Iraq, to Tunisia, Nigeria and Lebanon, to France and to the American states of Connecticut, Washington, Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota and California, is a modern phenomenon that has been incubated for a lengthy period that is now being realized because of a common factor - the resort to raw bloody violence.

From the brutality of Bashar al Assad's war upon the Syria people and the rise of the Islamic State(IS), the terrorists attacks on Paris, to Iraq's sectarianism and revenge, to the police killing of unarmed men from New York to Missouri to Chicago, to a prior year's killing of 26, including 20-elementary school children at Newtown, Connecticut, to the massacre at a community college in Washington, to Wednesday's mass killing of 14 in California; all these events involved stark violence perpetrated by a state, by law enforcement, by terrorists or by individuals with easy access to weapons despite their states of mental health including members of law enforcement. 

At this juncture in the human experience, there is the brutal violence of war in the Levant and its associated reactionary violence including terrorism couple with a religious ideology, which has clearly attracted many from Africa, Europe and the Americas. Complicating this reality is the phenomenon of marginalized and/or victimized individuals acting upon years of frustration on the behalf of a fallible religious ideology and willing with some coercion via a bride or a virgin to contribute to a cause of worth to themselves and their manipulators.

Adding to this violence is that which continues to be perpetrated upon too many minority men in America - police shootings of alarming numbers and law enforcement insistence that their actions would be vindicated as in years of yore. Then, there's the violence associated with minorities fighting back against unjust police actions and in the process being attacked by right wing groups. And topping these actions are the dangerous publicized rantings of at least one presidential candidate who advocates monitoring one particular religious faith.

Though recent violent events are more complex than one presidential candidate could logical venture to reason, the escalation of the cult of violence as protests to perceived injustices and/or to further the social, economic and political agenda of a self-accepted ideology, is a dangerous trend. But it is an evolving phenomenon that is complex in origin and impacted by history, experience and discriminatory social and political practices that have incubated into modern stark acts of violence of which the only cure could be the explicit just and equal treatment of all peoples.