"Our anger will either lead us to tap into our baser instincts or into the better angels of our nature."

Yesterday I found out a woman I work with's son was jumped in a nearby city. Luckily he is alive, but his eye socket was broken, as was his cheek bone in two separate places. He has to have surgery and metal screws put in to repair them.

I feel so terribly for them both. He had just been walking down a street, alone, around midnight (which, as a girl, I know is never a good idea), when someone approached him. And unfortunately, that someone wasn't alone.

What really gets me, though the entire event is awful and senseless, is that they didn't even steal anything. I guess that isn't true, they did take his hat, but everything else on him was left behind. It was violence just for the "fun" of it.

Of course, things could have ended much worse.

That same night a Pizza delivery man was shot while making a delivery and a patron was stabbed at a local club (both are still alive, thankfully). The following Sunday a woman walking home was beaten, and apparently nothing was stolen from her either.

What is going on? I know it's a city and lends itself to all sorts of shady people and behaviour, but it's still seems so...out of control? Am I alone in thinking this? Do these things happen every weekend and I just don't hear about it??

Maybe. Probably. But I ran across an article by Arianna Huffington, on Sarah Wilson's blog, discussing our "collective toxic immune system" and the Arizona shootings.

I think it quite applies:

And there is no doubt that our collective immune system is worn down, making us more susceptible to the kind of infection that turned that Arizona parking lot into a killing field. While there has never been a golden age in our democracy's history, there have been many times in which our national immune system was much stronger.


And this calamity should serve as a wake-up call that we need to bring more urgency to strengthening it. It’s very easy, as we’ve seen over the last few years, to ignore the toxicity — partly because we’re swimming in it. But it’s time to recognize the obvious: our society is in danger of coming apart at the seams — from our overheated political rhetoric and crumbling infrastructure to our rising poverty and shrinking middle class.

The whole article is excellent (as is Sarah Wilson's blog!), and if it didn't violate some sort of copyright law I'd post it in full. As it is, you'll have to go check it out yourselves.

We must also have a real conversation about what kind of country we want to live in, and take practical, concrete action to create it.

It seems like anger, hate and violence are tearing us asunder. I know this is a rather serious post, quite the deviation from my normal fare, but this is something I feel very strongly about. And it's time to start talking about it.