Tag: suicide

Death and Violence in America

W.J. Astore

It’s staggering the number of people dying in America in ways that are preventable. Here’s a quick summary, courtesy of Blake Fleetwood at Scheerpost:

  • Gun deaths are at record levels, up 45% from the previous decade. In 2020 there were a total of 45,222 firearm deaths in the US.
  • Suicide rates have gone up more than 30% in the last 20 years. More than 1.4 million adults attempt suicide every year in America. And 45,979 succeeded in killing themselves in 2020. The highest rate of suicide is among middle class white men.  Suicides rose to the highest in the central part of the country. In 2020, 54% of people who died by suicide did not have a known mental health condition. 
  • Health risks for adolescents have shifted from pregnancy, alcohol, and drug use to depression, suicide, and self harm.
  • Drug overdose data from the CDC indicates that there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before.

When you start adding these numbers, you reach a grim conclusion: Americans are killing themselves and others at record rates. Grimmer still are the numbers from the Covid-19 pandemic, which in the U.S. has killed more than a million people. Estimates suggest that a true national health care system could have reduced this number by 300,000 (!), but there’s no interest among Democrats or Republicans to create such a system. Our politicians, corrupted by money from the health care “industry,” Big Pharma, etc., have no interest in saving lives (or even saving money, since a national health care system would save trillions over time).

Is it any wonder why the U.S. government embraces violence with such zeal? If you can’t care for your own people, why should you care at all for other peoples, such as in Yemen or Ukraine? What matters is profit from selling weapons, whether in the U.S., awash in assault rifles and other guns, or overseas with massive arms sales or shipments to Saudi Arabia and Ukraine, among others.

Violence or the threat of violence can be enormously profitable to those who deal in it.

Last night, I was watching baseball and saw an advertisement for a new show. In one 30-second clip, I saw several assault rifles and a gun battle, with a few handguns thrown in for good measure. We are assaulted constantly by such imagery, so much so that gun violence is seen as “normal” because it has become our new normal. Hence the gruesome spike in mass shootings across America.

Way back in the early 1980s, I had a sticker that read “NRA Freedom.” Remarkably, “freedom” in America has become synonymous with having guns everywhere, more than 400 million of them. Other freedoms, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, are being curtailed and eroded with barely a complaint, but any attempt to make it slightly more difficult for a few people to buy guns is instantly opposed.

A culture of freedom is increasingly a cult of death. And as the Outlaw Josey Wales said, “Dyin’ ain’t much of a living.” Time to learn from Josey.

The Hidden Costs of War

Agent Orange victims Nguyen and Hung Vuong Pham, ages 14 and 15, as captured by Brian Driscoll, photographer, in 2008.(Huffington Post, 2013, see link in article)
Agent Orange victims Nguyen and Hung Vuong Pham, ages 14 and 15, as captured by Brian Driscoll, photographer, in 2008.(Huffington Post, 2013, see link in article)

W.J. Astore

If you’re in the U.S. military or you’re a veteran, you probably know casualty figures, especially deaths, from America’s wars.  To cite one example, America lost more than 58,000 men in the Vietnam War.  Their names are inscribed on the “The Wall” in DC.  I’ve been there.  Seeing all those names is a devastating experience.

But “The Wall” undercounts the number of American dead from that war.  Just the other day, I was talking to a veteran, a graduate of West Point, about Vietnam.  He told me he had two classmates who became pilots and who worked with Agent Orange, a toxic chemical defoliant, in Vietnam.  They both died later of brain tumors from their exposure to the chemical. Their names are not on The Wall.

I shared this story with a colleague, and he wrote back that his father’s best friend flew Agent Orange around in the Pacific, relocating it after the war.  After being exposed to it day after day, he died of cancer in his early thirties.  His name is also not on The Wall.

Wars are not over for our veterans after the U.S. government says they are.  Consider the surge in veteran suicides, especially for those in their fifties and sixties.  Estimates vary as to how many Vietnam veterans have taken their own lives, but the number may be as high as 100,000.  PTSD, chronic pain, depression, alcohol and drug addiction, and many other conditions linked to war ultimately become an unbearable load for many of our veterans.

(And as I’ve written about elsewhere, the cost of war was much much higher for the Vietnamese people, to include the continuing costs of exposure to Agent Orange, as shown in this article at Huffington Post)

My point is this: As a country, we just don’t recognize fully the true costs of our wars.  It’s not enough to add up the billions spent or the number of combat deaths.  We need to reckon with the aftermath of our wars, the way that veterans keep suffering and dying from wounds they suffered, many of them hidden from view, but no less real for that reason.  And we need to reckon with the destruction we inflict on other peoples and countries, for the “American way of war” is profligate with firepower, from high explosive and napalm and cluster munitions to Willy Peter (white phosphorous) and depleted uranium.

And maybe, just maybe, if we ever truly reckon with the cost of war to ourselves and others, we’ll strive harder to avoid war in the future.

A coda: Can we ban forever the term “surgical strike”?  Can we ban forever the term “collateral damage”?  Can we ban these and similar weasel words that diminish the horrifying and murderous nature of war?