Violent imagery and language -- and child abuse.

[JDPriestly]

I have a friend, a peaceful guy, really would never hurt anyone. But when he gets angry, when he is upset with someone, he talks about all the horrible ugly things he would like to see happen to them. The images are really awful.

Now I know this guy very well, and I know that he would never do these horrible things to anyone. In fact, he is the first to rush to help someone who is suffering. And I wondered, why does he use these images, this language that is so violent when he is angry? Sure, I become angry too. But images like that, language like that just never crosses my mind. Why does he react like that?

And then I remembered something that this friend has confided to me: He was physically abused as a child. Beaten among other things -- by a parent.

And it occurred to me that he associates having angry feelings -- just ordinary angry feelings that all of us have -- with violence. After all, that is how the adults around him expressed their anger when he was small.

I think this explains the inability of the right-wingers to understand what it is that we object to about their images, their rhetoric. They use their violent imagery and rhetoric because that is the only way they know to express anger.

Teach a child that the natural expression of anger is physical punishment and violence, and then of course, when that child as an adult becomes angry or wants to express anger, he will associate his anger with violence and express it in violent images and rhetoric.

And that is the key to the right-wing, at least those who use this emotionally charged violent imagery and rhetoric. They were abused as children. That's simply how they learned to express anger. They speak a different emotional language than many of us on the left do.

So, now the problem is how do we explain this to them.

[Ozymanithrax]

1. As long as their violent imagery works with their base...

they will not quit. It gets them power.

But that imagery is like heroin. Using it creates a tolerance that does not get the return they require from their base. So they get more violent. This isn't the first crazy time a crazy person has acted since 2008, we have seen an escalating series of these acts. I don't think it will stop until a sound majority reject the message at the ballot box and remove them from power.

[bengalherder]

2. You might be interested in this site:

http://www.psychohistory.com/

There are some interesting essays by psychologists exploring a theory very near to what you've stated. I found it to be very chilling stuff, often passed along cultually and generationally- and something that is often exploited by demogougues in mass outbreaks of violence, war, etc.

Edit to add, interesting quotes in a chapter of a book on that site entitled, The Emotional Life of Nations
by Lloyd deMause

From chapter 2, The Assasination of Leaders:

Americans from all parties were furious with Kennedy for various pretexts. Many began calling for a new Cuban invasion, agreeing with Barry Goldwater's demand that Kennedy "do anything that needs to be done to get rid of that cancer. If it means war, let it mean war."20 Kennedy was accused of being soft on Communism for living up to his no-invasion pledge to the Soviets, and when he then proposed signing a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with them, his popularity dropped even further.21
The nation's columnists expressed their fury towards the president, and




1:2 America felt death wishes toward Kennedy for not starting a war with Cuba


political cartoonists pictured Kennedy with his head being chopped off by a guillotine (above). Richard Nixon warned, "There'll be...blood spilled before over,"22 and a cartoon in The Washington Post portrayed Nixon digging a grave. Many editorialists were even more blunt. The Delaware State News editorialized: "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. His name right now happens to be Kennedy let's shoot him, literally, before Christmas."23 Potential assassins all over the country-psychopaths who are always around looking for permission to kill-saw all these media death wishes as signals, as delegations to carry out a necessary task, and began to pick up these fantasies as permission to kill Kennedy.24

[Liquorice]

3. I knew a guy just like that. He was also abused as a child and witnessed

a lot of fighting between his parents while he was growing up. I found out later that this guy (who seemed nice except for the violent imagery when he was angry), was extremely verbally abusive to the point of sadistic emotional cruelty towards his wife. I do agree that verbally abusive people have probably been abused in some way. You don't feel that kind of rage without something deep powering it.

The only thing I think you can do to fight it is to point out and condemn verbal abuse and verbal rage whenever you hear it. It must have a label before you can try to combat it. Some people are raised thinking that it's okay to talk that way, and may not realize it's wrong.

[JDPriestly]

4. Anger management courses are available

as are courses in how to raise your own children without abuse and anger.

I notice that the internet also has a lot of information about how best to care for and discipline your children.

Some other countries have more child abuse and are more reluctant than we are to admit it. But I think we need to do much, much more to educate parents to the methods for disciplining and training children that are nonviolent.

If I could, I would make this our number one national priority.

The dependency courts -- the courts in which judges decide on how to care for children after abuse -- are closed to the public.

While the confidentiality of the proceedings protects the children and adults involved, it prevents Americans in general but especially the media from being fully aware of the tragedy of this problem.

And I would bet that child abuse played a role in the way this young man acted out his fantasies and mental illness.