Culture of Death

In this country, don’t accidentally drive into a stranger’s driveway. Don’t walk up to the front door of a stranger’s house. Don’t absentmindedly open someone else’s car door. You might get shot. You might be wounded or killed as in recent “one-off” shootings.  And then there are the mass gun murders at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, the Aurora movie theater, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the El Paso Walmart, Parkland, Las Vegas, Binghamton, San Bernardino, Sutherland Springs, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, Monterey Park, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Uvalde, the Covenant School in Nashville, and Louisville.   

I usually attribute all this violence simply to the easy availability of guns in the United States. In fact, we have more guns than people in this country. However, after reading the first few pages of The Heart of Man by Erich Fromm, I agree with Fromm’s contention that American culture is a “culture of death,” in which human beings are regularly reduced to the status of things that may be readily disposed of with an AR-15.  

From argues,
…the bureaucratic-industrial civilization…(in) America has created a new type of man; he can be described as the organization man, as the automaton man, and as homo consumens. He is, in addition, homo mechanicus; by this I mean a gadget man, deeply attracted by all that is mechanical (like guns?), and inclined against that which is alive…. he becomes indifferent to life, fascinated by the mechanical, and eventually attracted by death and total destruction. Consider the role that killing plays in our amusements. The movies, the comic strips, the newspapers, (TV news networks), are full of excitement because they are full of reports of destruction, sadism, brutality. Millions of people live humdrum but comfortable existences—and nothing excites them more than to see or read of killings, whether it is murder or a fatal accident in an automobile race (or a deadly mass shooting?).
 
Fromm was writing in the 1960s. So, I have updated the quote above with my comments in parentheses. There is nothing parenthetical, however, about the gun killings which plague today’s society in the U.S. When I read of or hear about another mass murder, I want to scream, “Stop it! Stop it now!” But the mass shootings don’t stop and will no doubt continue for many years to come.

 ~ Richard Russell