Do We Need to Worry About Violence?

Last night I tuned in briefly to the NBC-Nightly News and the first segment was about the big storms that are sweeping across the country and how traffic is snarled on this highway, and that river has flooded, and yadda, yadda, yadda, and yadda — welcome to Winter.

Then the second segment was about an increase in hospital admissions because of the Covid and the flu, and then I switched the goddamn thing off.

Here we are, with two intractable wars going on and hundreds of heavy munitions being dropped on civilian neighborhoods in Gaza and Ukraine every day, but first we need to find out whether some fucking interstate highway will be reopened between Terre Haute, IN and Pittsburgh, PA.

Maybe it’s because none of our own troops are in harm’s way, maybe it’s because with those F-35 Lightning II jets there’s no country out there who can really stand in our way, maybe because nobody’s about to invade us, maybe that so-called security ‘problem’ on our Southern border gives those GOP assholes something to yap about, maybe, maybe, maybe.

But the bottom line is that we seem to be immured against any real concern about violence anywhere in the world, except when it has to do with violent crime in the neighborhood where we live. Now the fact that violent crime has dropped 8% from last year’s number and crimes against…