By Robert Field
Within days of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteered to serve in the armed forces. They fully recognized that a significant portion would die or returned crippled. But they had a strong sense of patriotism and they were determined to resist fascist Japan and Nazi Germany.
Tom Brokaw called those American “Our greatest generation.”
Let’s examine ourselves, the children, grandchildren and great- grandchildren of the aforementioned.
A week ago fourteen people were murdered in a terrorist attack in San Bernadino, California.
Taken into the perspective of murders since the turn of the century, murder rates by hundred thousand have dropped since 1970 from 7.9 to 4.5 in 2014. That is a reduction of about 40%.
There were 14,249 “non-negligent manslaughter cases” in the United States for 2014.
So what do we know?
The danger of being murder has actually steadily decline over the past two decades. We are safer now than at any time during most of our lives.
The San Bernadino, CA attack amounted to an increase in deaths of one in a thousand.
And yet a large portion of the USA population is obsessed with the danger of terrorist attacks and a large percent of Republicans, and undoubtedly many Democrats, are prepared to trash American values such as treating everyone without regard to their religion.
Much of the current generations are not just cowardly. They are both ignorant and irresponsible.
We play into the hands of the terrorists, encouraging future attacks, when we allow them to bend our spirit and trash our values. Our nation’s historic values are our greatest defense!
Rather we should stand our high moral ground, accept that such incidents will occur for a while but this too will pass, and redouble our efforts to properly educate our population concerning our historic values and, within constitutional guidelines, to prevent such occurrences.
We have a lot more to fear from traffic accidents (32,719 deaths in 2014) and from drug overdose (44,000 in 20014) than from terrorist attacks! Those are figures that should cause anxiety.
