Texas Tower Follow-up
You're not going to stop the terrorist without learning about treating the psych.
The treatment -- successful treatment -- of not only damaged but also healthy
minds that succumb to this form of homicide. This fascination humans have
in common has been a mainstay of the entertainment industry since before the
Arena in Rome. It tends to come out of the woodwork when the fabric of
society is not vibrant and well. You're trying to treat a starving patient
for a cold. You see a part of a problem all the while desiring to be
willfully oblivious to the causes.
Higher incidence in stress related areas. What does it take, in other
words for the person to become a killer. This doesn't always assume the
extreme form of terrorism. It is also practiced in milder forms such as
litigation and hostile takeovers leading to the inevitable demise, if only
slowly, of others, quite often on a mass level and quite often evoking
sensations of terror.
Those are just a couple of examples I could
site right off the bat. There may be thousands of other types and levels
of assault with intention to ultimately kill while at the same time terrorizing,
as the popular term goes, others in the proximity of the event or procedure.
For example, someone tailgating a sedan in a pick-up truck. In the event of
a rear-end collision, it would be almost certain death for those in the
car. The higher vehicle cuts easily into the body of the smaller
one. The majority of those who do such things know this.
Terrorism must be considered as a potential candidate for mental illness.
The ultimate form of this condition is dictatorship by a murderous regime.
In our present global condition, the advent of such a regime could only be
global. It can't be discounted, therefore, that many, if not the principals
in any organization of terrorism, may be suffering from such mental conditions.
But is the mental condition the result of some disease or an injury? It may be discovered with more research that it is simply a phenomenon of the aberration of thought processes in extensive periods of inactivity in the presence of what might be described as an impoverished environment.
As I wrote in one of my poems called
"Influence":
Influence of the gray,
balanced tones of shelter, those they there were sworn; where malcontent, in
hours spent, ideals of conflict there were bourn.
I wrote the poem in 1980, put it to music and sang it periodically in my repertoire in in several areas of the world as a street singer. It in fact was a prediction of an obvious and worsening situation.
Remember those who desire to kill may also be perfectly sane. Maybe that desire is latent within all human beings. Maybe an examination into
same-species killing in the animal kingdom would help in the examination of this
phenomenon. We are not the only species that kill it's own kind.
Some sorts do such as a form of territorial imperative, others as a result of a violent
rut or mating season. It has been observed that dauphins conduct low-level
forms of warfare. But it is known that in an extensive proportion of the
ever-growing human population, there are those who enjoy murder.
Why is this coming to light now? Because of the democratization of the globe. These flare ups happened before but on a smaller level. The British had that problem in the colonies of India and the French Foreign Legion had similar small-scale problems.
Spain, France and England had problems with this, without naming factions, here,
in the twentieth century. This is not to be confused with the resort to
arms in times of conflict, but rather the use of political motives to mask the
individual that defers to the desire to murder and that, if possible, on a mass
level.
Traumatization will always occur because of the inevitability of corruption and legalized crime in human societies.
As a result, injustices will subsequently also occur, and in the historic cycle,
the vicious cycle, the result is such a level of social upheaval that mass
homicide for amusement might be had by a majority of any population, hidden in
the cover of riots, often fomented by would-be looters. This may be overcomable by education of the masses, but not the 3r's type one thinks of when the "e" word is mentioned. This would rather be a
street-savvy education on the interdiction of criminal activity.
Buddy, you've got a whale of a situation on
your hands.
That, more than anything, was the success story of the United States, the significant enough contingent of the working population was street
savvy enough in the fifties to sufficiently skirt the phenomenon. Notice I said "skirt".
The malevolent aspect of humanity is always waiting just below the
surface. If a society becomes too complacent, it will emerge, quite often
using the term "bad guy" for everyone else. That's the profile.
These factions rose up repeatedly throughout history, particularly ancient history,
during incidents of corruption, and acted as a natural compensatory element to suppress
corrupt societies, such as that of Byzantium in the first millennium A.D.
In other words if a society goes to sleep, as it were, asleep at the switch, it
might never wake up. Life goes on? Not for millions of it's
citizens.
I couldn't help noticing after listening to the uproar over the latest outbreak of terrorism, as it's called these days, and how nations are attempting to go about countering it. It occurred to me those guys are seeing a few trees, so I thought I'd take you to some distance and show you the
forest. As I said in another article, "The Second United States Civil
War", this is a tap on the back. You don't get wake-up calls. You're in the cheap motel.
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Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email: sociology@paulhallart.com