(This non-edifying graphic from early American history recalls the intense hatred the American colonists had for Tax Collectors. "No Taxation Without Representation" was the rallying call during the American Revolution for Independence from Great Britain and the Crown's tax collectors.
This graphic also gives a more historically accurate explanation for the "tarring and feathering" and "hangings" in early American history. It was tax collectors who were the focus of the anger of the American colonists, not the members of any particular ethnic or racial group.)
The United States of America emerged from the violence of the Revolutionary War of Independence from Great Britain in 1776. The new nation, almost 100 years later, was forcibly preserved by the violence of the Civil War, including the assassination of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
American Presidents have been assassinated. US 'Babyboomers, now near 60 years old, and their lives were forever changed by the 1963 assassination of the 35th President of the US, the youngest and only Catholic to have been elected President of the US, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Tears still come to baby-boomers eyes, knowing that the safety of our nation had been so breached. This began a series of assassinations, the young President's brother and his Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy. Then came the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
American Presidents have survived assassination attempts. Most recently in 1981, Ronald Reagan was wounded by John W. Hinckley, Jr. a young Virginian believed to have been motivated by the delusion of thereby attracting the romantic interest of Hollywood beauty Jodie Foster.
John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin, has been ridiculed as an unsuccessful actor, perhaps as a member of an opposing political group, perhaps acting out a need for notoriety.
His assassination cry, "As is always to tyrants", however, voiced the frustration of many Americans, Union and Confederate, that Lincoln's imposition of martial law during the Civil War to preserve the Union was denying many Americans their basic constitutional rights as American citizens.
What may be common to assassins is that each is an unstable personality, influenced by the currents of controversy at a particular time in human and US history. Yet each assassin has a well-developed plan, has chosen a method of assassination likely to be successful, and each commits to the completion of that plan.
None is so unstable as to be truly 'insane', to not know the difference between right and wrong. The assassin has chosen to act to end the life of the politician or
well-known person, and attempts, at times succeeding, to do so. The assassination is for the assassin the best, quickest, or only way to end the influence of the person the assassin has decided 'to stop'.
The assassin, while acting as an individual, somehow is not separate from the volatile opinions and outrageous frustrations of the day. And yet the assassin cannot be excused because there is a war on, there is crime and violence in the streets, there is a serious prolonged finanical, economic recession or depression, or there is social disorder due to changing patterns in immigration, business, governmental policies or political ideologies.
But what must be understood is that the assassin, in times of social and political change or upheaval, also is not really a lone, deranged murderer. The assassin may have some type of psychiatric history. Most people who are frustrated, angered, or enraged do not take up a gun or ammunition to become an assassin. Only the assassin acts.
In psychiatry, there are unusual phenomena, the 'folie a deux', or in such times as ours, the "folie a multitude". These are times when people join or even conjoin, share an unusual or very aberrant way of thinking, explicitly or implicitly, allowing or encouraging an assassin to act.
Many current US politicians do not want to accept that huge numbers of the American public are upset by financial and economic disasters and a fundamental change in US political ideology. Such lucky "employed" politicans, bureaucrats, governmental contractors, and members of now politically and financially enfranchised ethnic and racial groups do not want to accept that many Americans see them as aggressors against the mainstream taxpayer for their own tax-derived salary and benefits.
These politicians want to label accused attempted assassin, accused murderer and shooter of innocent bystanders at the Rep. Gabrielle Giffords Rally Massacre, Tuscon, Arizona, Januay 8, 2011, like Jared Lee Loughner, as psychiatrically-disturbed, a mental health system failure. This of course makes this young man a "poster boy for mental illness", a "cause celebre" for more demands for more taxes and monies for governmental programs in mental health. Loughner is an individual who now must face the courts and accept his personal responsibility in a very violent episode in a very tumultuous era in American political and financial history.
Loughner too raises some bigger issues in his newsmedia televised videotape at Pima Community College. Psychologists and commentators termed his tape confusing, evidence of his psychological instability. What he did televise was a shared concern among students, that he "would be homeless, for going to Pima Community College".
There was trouble at school, he was cast as an outcast. There was trouble at home, a nice home, a son who was not getting along well with a mother who worked for the local Parks & Recreation Department and a father who was an avid gardener.
It may be time for the whole society to explore the "perceived need" to indebt young people trying to succeed in an overcrowded labor force by sending them to school for courses which are not likely to lead to a full-time job, threaten their family incomes or home, and relationships with family and friends.
It may be time for the whole society to explore the "perceived need" to fund more police work and courts, putting more pressure on people to "be bad", become customers, statistical data to support funding for their local social welfare, police, and court industry.
About a century ago, a writer named Shirley Jackson, wrote a horrifying story called "The Lottery". Rural New England villagers gathered in tense progression to a "straw-pulling" event. In the terrifying ending of the story, each villager took a rock. Together the village stoned the "winner" of the lottery, a formerly beloved neighbor or friend.
It may be time for the whole society to explore why such murderous rituals are preserved in modern American society, in the political masacre in Tuscon, Arizona, why any individual must lose as victim or perpetrator of crime in the modern US.
There is 'no greater good' in a culture of violence. Bloodlust perpetuates bloodlust. There is not enough life insurance death benefit money, governmental or mental health funding in the universe to right the wrongs done.
(Read more on this or other topics in "Recessionay Currents" on http://monthlynotesten.blogspot.com, http://monthlynotes.blogspot.com on www.google.com.)
Graphic: Thought to be a newspaper or journal graphic expressing the outrage of early American colonists against tax collectors and taxation.
Email mkrause54@yahoo.com or mkrause381@gmail.com to comment or request a copy of this or other blogs posted by mary for monthlynotesstaff on http://monthlynotesten.blogspot.com (http://monthlynotes.blogspot.com through monthlynotesfourteen.blogspot.com) on www.google.com.
