03-30-2010, 01:25 PM
goodintentions Wrote:Come on Danno - I usually have great respect for you & your thoughts. But surely you aren't suggesting that this country trained anybody to kill and rape twelve year old girls? That just sounds stupid..There is a diffenence between intentionally training a preson to do something and indirectly training by example.
The environmental factors for every individual are different. I'll bet Mr. Kerpan, like most of us, was bombarded by thousands of messages during his life which glorified violence and killing. Some may have been subtle some not so subtle. I would bet he saw a lot of violence and inhumanity while he was in Vietnam. He may have even been a direct participant in such violence and inhumanity. There certainly was untold inhumanity there; over 3 millions people were killed because of the war between 1959 and 1975. Roughly 58,000 Americans were killed, 150,000 wounded, 1700 missing. The U.S. forces were responsible for causing approximately 90,000 innocent civilian deaths. That's a vast amount of human misery... all because our government wanted to impose our will on someone else. There is a very good chance that a protracted war in Vietnam was orchestrated solely for profit.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in war... a lot of absurdities, but the brain tends to function in a logical manner. You can't torture someone or not feed them when they are prisoner but you can blow their brains out and it's ok. We even seem to condone the killing and maiming of innocent civilians, merely calling them "collateral damage". Gee, that just happens to be the name of an Arnold Swartzenegger movie that is loaded with the glorification of violence. One of the more significant factors having an impact on the human psyche in Vietnam was the fact that it was difficult to tell friend from foe.
For anyone to discount those experiences, such as a states attorney during a murder prosecution, only reveals how inept and ill-prepared they are to effectively and logically address such issues. To consciously discount those experiences and solely have a desire to punish someone without fully understanding the forces which caused them in the first place and without procedure to rehabilitate the person is itself insane.
Our society is rife with the glorification of violence.
If you teach school children heavy in mathematics would anyone be surprised that there are a lot of mathematicians in our society?
We tend to not notice and we tend to discount the effect of the huge amount of glorification of violence in our society but the results speak for themselves.
Based on logic I have no doubt that violence in equalâs violence out.