WhatFinger


We look for ways to redeem ourselves from the immense hatred we have managed to build for each other – a hatred which unless we permanently dismiss from our lives, will inevitably lead mankind to its own self-destruction

LAS VEGAS MASSACRE



I don’t know about you, but after what transpired in Las Vegas last Sunday, October 1st, we must all ask ourselves, what is our world coming to? What kind of a world are we living in – a world, I should say, capable of nurturing such hatred as that fostered by this Las Vegas’ animal Stephen Paddock. As far as I was concerned such a behavior was typically reserved for wild animals. For a presumably tamed human being of the twenty-first century to go out on a rampant killing spree of other humans is, to say the least, “unthinkable”. For this animal to go out and in a frenzy, take the lives of 58 and hurt 527 innocent lives who had merely gone out to have a good time in a Country Music concert is simply put: preposterous - young people’s lives who minutes before the savage massacre had joined together in singing “God Bless America”, while unbeknown to 58 of them, this would be their last chant on this earth. What an irony!

World becoming a more dangerous place to live in

If you really think about it, not even a massacre such as the one in Las Vegas, should come as any kind of surprise to any of us anymore. I personally feel the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda, which killed 2,996 people and injured over 6000 others, marked the beginning of a new era for mankind. Statistics in 2015 show there has been a 650% increase in fatal terror attacks on people living in the world’s biggest economies. Simply said, these gruelling statistics point out to a developed world becoming a more dangerous place to live in. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2016. During this time-period there have been more than 170,000 cases of terrorist-related attacks. Among others:
  • 83,000 bombings
  • 18,000 assassinations
  • 11,000 kidnappings
All things considered then, the Las Vegas massacre, should not come as much of a surprise to the rest of us. I say, even if the massacre was not a terrorist-related incident, it doesn’t matter much, does it? The fact remains that the end-result are the same, to wit, innocent souls are killed and maimed for no good reason whatsoever. Honestly, I don’t really care if this was the result of: a “terrorist” plot; a “lone-wolf” job; the act of a deranged psychopath; the plot by one or by many. What difference does it really make? Regardless of how, who, or why, it was done - the end-result being the same, isn't it? Go and ask the dead and the wounded if they care who, why or what motivated the perpetrators.

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Whether you choose to leave the word “terrorist” to preface the word “attacks” is almost immaterial. In the end they all happened to be acts of violence by man, one against another.

So…the point I am trying to make I guess, deals not so much with the obsessive yearning that follows in the aftermath of events such as Las Vegas, justifiably so I may add, in search of what motivates such heinous acts, as maybe the fact that we should all be concentrating on the bigger scope of what is going on with ‘mankind’ itself; with us as a “species”. Are we intrinsically evil? Ironically, therein, we may find yet sooner than later some of the answers we are so desperately looking for in the irrational behaviors such as the Las Vegas massacre. With all due respect to the academia, our anthropologists specifically, for all I know man has been at war with each other probably since the beginning of time. However, I venture to say, our ancestors, more likely than not, got along with each other in more peaceful ways than we do nowadays as otherwise we would not have proliferated to the numbers now populating the planet. And, then again, maybe not. I don’t really know, but, what I do know is how bad it has gotten when a man, for no apparent reason, barracks himself in a room to randomly kill innocent people, mind you, with one added twist, which is that our twenty-first century weaponry, unlike that of our ancestry, has the capability of killing or wounding hundreds in a matter of seconds. I say it cannot get much worse than that, can’t it? I am not about, mind you, to give you any kind of historical overviews on human warfare. History speaks for itself. However, I will say this, for the most part, man has been in a constant war with one another. The innate will of man to expand his possessions; to conquer; to prevail; to increase his wealth, both at personal as well as at a communal level, not to mention the religious wars aimed at imposing one’s pious beliefs over the rest of mankind, has all been rhetorically affecting the way we humans interact with one another, albeit paving the way for all the hatred, the acrimony, and the prevailing bitterness now afflicting us humanoids. It should not come as a surprise to anyone whatsoever that a Stephen Paddock, a member of this “species” did what he did last Sunday. Nor it should come as any surprise as well that there have been over 170,000 terrorist attacks in the last half century. Whether you choose to leave the word “terrorist” to preface the word “attacks” is almost immaterial. In the end they all happened to be acts of violence by man, one against another.

The question is what does the future hold for mankind?

The question is what does the future hold for mankind? I personally have all the reasons to belief that, at the rate we are going, it is just a matter of time, before we self-destroy. It is in the Scriptures -the sacred writing of Christianity in the Bible. According to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible, Armageddon is the prophesied term used in a generic sense to refer to any end of the world scenario. I will spare you, however, all the religious undertones that deal with the end of mankind. I must disqualify myself from such an attempt, based strictly on the obvious lack of required know-how for such a feat. I base, instead, all my conclusions, solely and exclusively on logic and common sense of what is happening all around us every day. As prevalent as seen in the violence that is now abounding in our most basic form of politics here in the U.S. Just think about this for a moment, one of man’s most destructive tools are nuclear weapons –explosive devices that derive their destructive force from nuclear reactions – a nuclear bomb can devastate an entire city by blast, fire and radiation, thus the infamous label of weapons of mass destruction. Near the end of World War II, on August 6, 1945, the U.S., detonated a uranium gun-type fission bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima; three days later, on August 9, the U.S. Army Air Forces detonated a plutonium implosion-type fission bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. These bombings resulted in the deaths of approximately 200,000 people. Just as a point of reference, the blast from the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy” released about 15 kilotons of energy, equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. The Nagasaki bomb, nicknamed Fat Man produced an explosion of about 21 kilotons. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, set off by the Soviet Union in 1961 produced an insane 50-megaton blast, about 3,333 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb – a bomb which back in the day, leveled an entire city.


Simply put, we live in world proliferated by nuclear arsenals

Simply put, we live in world proliferated by nuclear arsenals, all of which are used as “Détente” tools in a continuous fight for world supremacy. Some of the world powers which have acknowledged to detonate and possess nuclear weapons are the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel is believed to possess nuclear weapons albeit it does not acknowledge having them. I personally fear Iran also has them, pursuant to Barack Obama’s infamous treaty with this historical enemy-state. Germany, Italy, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands are nuclear weapons sharing states. No need to remind us, what Korea’s Kim Jon-un, labeled by president Donald Trump as the ‘little rocket man’ – a label which sarcastically suggests the man’s persistent threats to nuke Korea’s surrounding nations. I don’t know if you are getting the message and the moral to today’s narrative. In the most tangential way I can think of the world, it’s now armed to where “mankind” could literally wipe itself off of the face of the earth, almost at a moment’s notice, probably in less time than it took the Las Vegas animal to kill the 58 victims of his massacre. Yes, we should do everything and anything we can to find out what in the world triggered this Las Vegas psychopath to do what he did. But I truly feel this massacre should also instil in all of us an equal reminder of exactly where we are and where we are headed in terms of our ability to coexist in this beautiful God-given planet of ours, we gallantly call “earth” – the home of mankind. I hope and pray that the deaths of the Las Vegas massacre will serve us all but as a friendly reminder that there is still time to join-in peacefully; to rejoice in the graces given us by just being born; to learn how to forgive and forget; to respect and love one another for who we are. Maybe the time has come that we should build bridges instead of walls; temples of faith instead of bombs and weaponry; use social media to communicate better with each other. I truly hope that the death of the 58 martyrs of the Las Vegas massacre will not be in vain and while we anxiously look for answers to the unfathomable, we also look for ways to redeem ourselves from the immense hatred we have managed to build for each other – a hatred which unless we permanently dismiss from our lives, will inevitably lead mankind to its own self-destruction. God save us all!

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Obie Usategui -- Bio and Archives

Obie Usategui (The Patriot Obsever) and also runs AFCV-Americans For Conservative Values.  Obie is also the author of The Beginning of the End—“The transition to Communism in our own United states has come peacefully, ironically, via democratically-sanctioned elections”


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