Kid set on fire. The “c” word. Swastikas. Octomom. Two endless wars. No health care…

October 14, 10:57 AMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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Paradise for teen thugs? Deerfield Beach, FL (Wiki Commons)

Every age and every society seems to have had its share of problems and often those problems seemed to be the worst, the terminal ones that would finally end human life on the planet as we know it.

The difference between then and now is this: Today, we are no longer human. We have already become Cyber Sapiens. There is very little humanity in so many of us that a bunch of young teens could set another one on fire because he was protecting his father’s belongings from them. They are thugs well before time, and it’s disgusting and it’s sad.

I got a comment on this column last week that used the “c” word, a foul word that displays the complete lack of respect for others of the person who used it. And that word is supremely hateful. It is thuggery, masked behind the opportunity to express hatred in public anonymously. I won’t tolerate it; when I became aware of it, the comment was removed. That comment was made by a thug.

Swastikas were impressed in the grass at a posh golf course this week, along with references to Mr. Obama. It’s tough to figure out what that moron or group of morons was trying to say. Did they mean Mr. Obama is making this nation a fascist state along the lines of Hitler’s Germany? Not likely; Hitler exterminated people of color, any color, except lily white. Did they mean to insult and threaten Mr. Obama with that symbol? Were they skinheads? More likely, I think, they were children like the ones who set the Florida boy on fire. Thugs.

Shortly after Mr. Bush was elected, I used to walk my dog in a Carroll County park with streams and little bridges and rocks to climb on. One day, that bridge was covered with swastikas. Why? Because some teenagers thought it would be fun, probably. Fun to deface public property meant for the enjoyment of all. And, I don’t doubt, meant to threaten the two or three African-Americans who lived in that dreadful little town. That, too, was the work of thugs. More thuggery: When I called the town office about it, to have it removed at the very least, I got an “oh well” sort of answer. That, too, is the reaction of a thug.

I make no bones about it: I believe Carroll County, Maryland, is every bit as backward and hostile to human life as the worst of the red counties anywhere in the nation. Just so you know my bias. But what can one expect of a county that re-elects Roscoe Bartlett time after time, disenfranchised a black voter before my eyes in Bush’s second “selection” campaign (and yes, I did call the NAACP) and in which one of my riding students, a Jewish lady, asked me one day if she would be safe coming for lessons in Carroll County, where I taught part-time. She feared the local thugs.

And then we have Octomom. Or at least we had. She had her fifteen minutes of fame, and now, with any luck, the rest of us will get to raise her litter. Poor children. But Octomom? What of her, and how did she get that way? And what sanctions, if any, will ever be imposed on her ignorant doctor? Octomom and her doctor might best be described as thugs, and all those children as their victims.

We have two useless wars tearing apart the middle east. During Vietnam, there was only one. Mr. Bush, who weaseled out of participating so he could party-icipate in some Texas National Guard unit, must have figured killing off another generation would be a good thing. More money for him and his buddies, both from selling the war machinery, and paring down the population of young people looking for a leg up. Instead, so many of them got a leg off, or an arm, a hand, an eye. And then they were famously virtually imprisoned at Walter Reed a few years back and treated worse than welfare cheats at a big city ER. Thuggery at a national, and inexcusable, level.

What else? 

We have CEOs of a formerly trustworthy industry, banking, behaving like thugs, and so far, getting away with it. Thugs.

We have our politicians discussing how to give the population the least possible relief on the health care issue while doing the least possible damage to the obscene profits of the health insurance industry and pharmaceuticals. This, too, is thuggery, against all of us.

We have wingnuts castigating Mr. Obama and the Nobel committee for awarding him the Peace Prize. Whether it is for what he has done (first African American president, resurrecting our reputation globally, tackling major parts of the eight-year dismantling of America perpetrated by the Bush cabal, and more), or what he still intends to do…it doesn’t matter. It was a recognition that America is not lost. Not yet. To denigrate this prize when our world is falling about our ears and this is a bright spot…yes, the actions of thugs.

We are all thugs if we allow all the thuggery and skullduggery above to go unremarked, unpunished and unremediated.

Someone who commented on one of my HuffPo posts regarding the young man in Florida who was set ablaze got it exactly right. He (and I’m assuming it is a fairly young man, from the avatar attached and the statement) wrote:

What you’re talking about seriously worries me all the time. I noticed what you described happening at the age of 13. All my friends had such cozy lives that they didn't know empathy or sympathy at all. Everything is disposable including people.”

That’s it, in a nutshell.

Mr. Bush spent eight years convincing us of something we were already beginning to think, as a result of Facebook sorts of internet “community” replacing face time, law and order being a TV show and not a way of life, and children being regarded more as prize Pomeranians to be shown off and adored rather than taught and loved: We are disposable, then?

No, we are not. We are as unique as snowflakes, and as beautiful.

Here’s a suggestion. Begin in a small way to gain back our authentic humanity. Don’t let the artificial intelligence of TV shows and greeting cards with their sloppy sentimentality replace the ability to feel deeply and express honestly.

Perhaps there will be a groundswell of honest reaction, not programmed by those with something to gain at our expense, like the choreographed “tea parties.” Or the mindless banging of the drum about our young soldiers getting killed, at the same time those yelling most loudly about that sad waste of promise quake in fear because a terrorist might land on our shores. We are willing to trade our civil liberties for safety from something that may never happen; we are unwilling to trade our civic action for passing health care reform when EACH MONTH, more people die from lack of health care than died on 9/11.

Time to take off the rose-colored glasses and take a look at what our disengagement from our own humanity has wrought. Time to assess with clear vision and not with the clouds induced by repeated lies by those whose ethics are non-existent and would enslave us for their own desires and enrichment.

If we don’t begin to assess the effects of the cyberworld more accurately and take corrective action, we will see more thirteen-year-olds set afire because they tried to protect their family from some predator.

And that is unacceptable.

It is unethical watch in feigned helplessness as the most amazingly founded nation in history sinks into a slime pit of its own making because we don’t want to make judgments as to what is right and what is wrong, celebrate the former and remediate the latter.

It’s that simple.