A Brutal Society

As if more examples were needed, the gunning down of a child in Cleveland for brandishing a toy pistol has again clearly demonstrated that in American society, the life of a black person isn’t worth much.

Even if the child had stolen a real gun from his household — which, considering the arsenals legally kept in American homes, would be neither unusual nor rare — the police would have had other alternatives available to them short of gunning him down in cold blood. The United States presents itself to the world as the land of freedom and liberty. In reality, American society is fundamentally sick.

It’s probably anything but normal that blacks — who make up 13 percent of the total U.S. population — only hold 9 percent of all undergraduate college degrees, while they make up over 40 percent of the prison population. They are prisoners of poverty.

Sure, in this country a black man can be elected president, become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or chief justice of the Supreme Court, but the majority of them work as janitors, security guards or in service occupations. For countless others that are unemployed, have always been unemployed and in all likelihood will never be employed, the future holds nothing for them other than a bleak existence in a decaying and violent ghetto.

For the average white person, it’s a matter of “out of sight, out of mind,” as long as black people mainly stay among their own kind and make life a living hell just for themselves.

If the violence spills over the ghetto borders, call in the police — whose armaments would be out of place in any other constitutional democracy in the world but are comparable to the militias used by despots and dictators to oppress and control their upstarts and malcontents. The “land of the free” is a haven of freedom for those who can afford to buy it. For those who cannot, it is simply an inescapable prison of poverty and hopelessness.

Cleveland has again clearly demonstrated that “weaponizing” a society is a dead end. The wave of burglaries in Luxembourg, for example, has shown that in a country where the populace is unarmed, the burglars also tend to be unarmed.

If the majority of households here in Luxembourg had as many guns as is common in the U.S., we would have had more than one bloody showdown between brave homeowners and criminals. This happens almost daily in the United States, where — unlike in Hollywood — it isn’t always the bad guy who draws the short straw.

A “weaponized” society is a brutal society and by no means one where good always triumphs over evil.