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When people say ‘America is a violent country,’ what do they mean, really?

They don’t really mean we have psychotics who mass murder. We do indeed have these; but other countries do too. UD thinks that what distinguishes the United States is that we have violent people running many of our institutions. We have violent local governments; we have violent school boards.

Let’s not talk about our obscenely violent last president and his barbarians. That’s too easy. Let’s move further down.

Very few countries on earth produce people like Chesa Boudin.

Very few produce people like George Parker, a school superintendent who packs his schools with kiddie psychopaths.

Sure, when six year olds take out their loaded guns in class and expertly shoot their teachers in the chest, George figures he’s gonna have to handle a certain amount of incoming. Like Boudin, he will explain – but not in so many words! – to parents and teachers and kids that some population is going to have to be the sacrificial location where okay a few parents and teachers and kids will be killed but it’s in the service of helping the unfortunate among us and I mean did you know that very few homeless schizophrenics (see Boudin) and psychotic six year olds who live in houses with unsecured guns are homicidal? RELAX. I mean, do the numbers. It’s not gonna happen every day that these people attack your children and their teachers. Y’all are probably gonna be okay. And even if they do attack …

During a three-hour school board meeting dedicated solely to public comment, Newport News teachers and parents said students who assaulted classmates and staff were routinely allowed to stay in the classroom with few consequences. They said the shooting of Abigail Zwerner could have been prevented if not for a toxic environment in which teachers’ concerns are systemically ignored.

“Every day in every one of our schools, teachers, students and other staff members are being hurt,” high school librarian Nicole Cooke told the board. “Every day, they’re hit. They’re bitten. They’re beaten. And they’re allowed to stay so that our [enrollment] numbers look good.”

They’re running some of our schools and local governments. In response, “Many parents are propelled into politics through service on school boards after seeing the [violent] state of their kids’ schools.”

Letting dangerous people deteriorate on the streets and in our schools is not a policy. It’s a nihilism, a degeneracy. A mental violence. You either replace these people and these structures or you run as far away as possible.

***************************

The choices our government makes affect our kids, taxes, schools, roads and lives. They are in the hands of the people we elect — but who we pick is constrained by those willing to run. Our democracy is dodging bullets [released by threatening, violent, gun-obsessed people running in and winning American elections]. We will not be able to do so forever.

Bang.

Margaret Soltan, January 19, 2023 2:29PM
Posted in: guns

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One Response to “When people say ‘America is a violent country,’ what do they mean, really?”

  1. University Diaries » ‘The teacher who police say was shot by a 6-year-old student had repeatedly asked administrators for help with the boy. But officials downplayed warnings about his behavior from her and other educators, including dismissin Says:

    […] I point out in this earlier post, America is a violent country not so much because particular individuals are violent; […]

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
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truffula, commenting at Historiann

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