Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Planned Parenthood Is Passing Up Opportunity To Educate Public And Clients About Escalating Violence

Both the mainstream media and Planned Parenthood are in an excellent position to educate the public about how violence escalates from early child abuse, bullying, hazing to more extreme acts later in life including the Colorado Springs Shooting; but neither of them seem to be even trying to do a good job; or at least not with their highest profile public comments, although Planned Parenthood may be doing more when they council young parents.

The recent shooting in Colorado is just one of many examples where fanatical adults have turned to violence to express their extreme views. There is an enormous amount of research to indicate that early childhood education or abuse have long term impacts and that when it involves abuse it teaches children to deal with problems through violence.

Coincidence or not, the location of this particular shooting may be related, one way or another, since it is also the same area where one of the most prominent advocates for corporal punishment, which teaches children to deal with problems through violence, James Dobson, founded "Focus on the Family." I reviewed his child rearing methods and how they lead to indoctrination and escalating violence in a previous post which is listed below along with other posts and sources that do additional research on this and alternatives, so I won't go into quite as much detail here; but most of this information is almost never mentioned on the commercial media and when spokespeople from Planned Parenthood go on the news shows they never seem to mention it either.

Instead they only cover the same debate over and over again which never accomplishes anything; and the only other contributing factor that the traditional media discusses is gun control, or to a lesser degree mental health. When discussing gun control they also repeat the same things over and over again without accomplishing anything; and when discussing mental health they never seem to discuss what leads to mental health problems or how to treat it.

This is highly unfortunate since the same research that shows child abuse and corporal punishment leads to escalating violence also shows it leads to greater mental health problems, indoctrination, and paranoia among other problems. The simplest research to confirm this might be statistics about which states have the highest murder rates compared to the ones that still allow corporal punishment in schools. In a previous post, also listed below, I went into more detail, but in both 2002 and 2012 seven out of the ten states with the highest murder rates allowed corporal punishment but only two of the states with the ten lowest murder rates allowed it in schools. The two with lowest murder rates that allowed it were rural and didn't use corporal punishment nearly as much as the states with the highest murder rates.

The states with the highest murder rates that didn't allow corporal punishment also had a large number of abandoned inner cities which is one of the other biggest contributing causes to crime, but most the ones that did allow corporal punishment were much more rural. These states had higher murder rates than many of the abandoned inner cities. The worst was Louisiana which has New Orleans, one of the worst abandoned inner cities and allows corporal punishment, so this state has the biggest contributing causes of crime inevitably leading to the highest murder rates.

You never hear this in the traditional media, yet they're hard facts that can be confirmed easily.

If the majority of the public knew about the biggest contributing causes for crime and the political establishment discussed them more then they could make policy decisions that would be much more effective at reducing crime; unfortunately the political establishment and media is far more concerned with manipulating people's emotions for profit or the benefit of campaign contributors than they are in giving them the information they need to make rational decisions, which is necessary, in a sincere democracy.

Since part of what Planned Parenthood does is council parents about raising children I would hope that they do much more to inform them about how child abuse leads to escalating violence; however when their representatives are invited to news shows they never seem to mention this or consider whether it is a contributing cause that leads to anti abortion extremism. Anti-Abortion opponents are often similar to gun rights advocates who make strong emotional appeals and selectively cite facts, often made up to support their cause. In the case to anti-abortion extremists, they, of course, refer to themselves as "pro-life;" and some of the more rational ones are "pro-life;" However many of them indicate that once the child is born they're opposed to any social care for the child which would preserve the quality of life for them. A large group of supposedly "pro-life" people oppose environmental protection, which would save much more lives than abortion, supports many wars based on emotional appeals and lies leading to thousands of innocent murders, and oppose many other regulations that could protect lives from auto safety to education and many other issues.

Many of the highest profile people from the Democratic party act as if this bizarre behaviour can't be explained; but understanding early childhood indoctrination does explain it. The most extreme people go through an educational process that could be described as "radicalization" although this term is selectively being used in the media for propaganda purposes. If you rely on the media to give you information about how this so-called "radicalization" process takes place it is unlikely that you'll get a consistent or rational definition of it.

They only apply it to enemies, usually what they call "radical Muslim extremism" and they give the impression that it can happen almost magically in a short period of time on the internet or when people come into contact with the enemy who seem to have a mystical way of "radicalizing" people. This is a highly inaccurate perception of how a reasonable version of radicalization might work and it wouldn't just apply to those that disagree with the political establishment.

A far more reasonable explanation is that it begins with early childhood abuse that escalates with bullying, peer pressure, hazing, including military hazing that takes place in boot camp and propaganda later in life. This wouldn't be a process that happens overnight or through some mystical process, and without additional contributing factors it can't happen on the internet.

This process can be prevented by teaching critical thinking skills from an early age without using intimidation or threats of violence to force someone to believe what they're told or conform to any given group. Since Benjamin Spock and many other modern child rearing experts, including more recent ones like Barbara Coloroso, have advised on more tolerant methods of child rearing violence has dropped dramatically and it has dropped higher in areas where their teaching has been more common. Areas where James Dobson's teachings is more commonly accepted with continuing use of corporal punishment remain common hasn't seen as steep a decline in violence.

There are signs of child abuse leading to escalating violence from most if not all murderers some researchers like Dorothy Otnow Lewis or Lonnie Atkins have researched often finding medical records or police records to confirm it. There are usually signs of this for many high profile cases as well, although it often takes time to find it, and traditional reporters don't always do this. This includes both the planned parenthood shooter, who has a history of domestic violence and abuse of animals and the San Bernardino who had a father that had emotional problems, threatening to commit suicide and his mother allegedly got a restraining order against him. Dylaan Roof and many other mass murderers also had violent backgrounds that were exposed by the media fairly quickly and further research almost always turns up additional evidence.

This should be clear evidence that teaching parents better child rearing tactics would do an enormous amount to reduce long term violence. In both the recent incidents the shooters allegedly were pursuing what they might have thought was a just cause; but in both cases their cause was highly distorted and they attacked innocent people. Presumably they were acting more out of anger than justice although they may have thought that it was justice they were pursuing. This is almost certainly because they were raised in a similar manner where they were abused as part of an "education" process and it left them emotionally unstable. This may mean that they might have had a much more difficult time telling just causes from rational one because they may may have been abused in the same manner and learned to act emotionally instead of rationally.

Robert Lewis Dear was almost certainly raised in an abusive manner and when all the rhetoric came out about body parts he may have used that as an excuse to strike out at someone but his history abusing others indicates that his primary concern almost certainly wasn't a rational sense of justice. Syed Farook may have also been responding to the ISIS propaganda we've been hearing so much about lately but it isn't necessarily the same propaganda that we see on traditional TV. This propaganda looks far more like anti-ISIS propaganda which makes them look very bad than ISIS propaganda, which would presumably make them look much better. Muslim propaganda almost certainly puts much more emphasis on the bombing of Muslim countries and support for tyrants in their areas that have abused their people.

However if the target audience for ISIS propaganda is prone to violent retaliation then they might also include vengeful propaganda like what the traditional media focuses on. To most people this seems to make ISIS look very bad but we are now looking at a fanatical "radicalization" process playing out which could incite radicals from both sides. Most of this is coming from Donald Trump, who is calling to kill the families of alleged terrorists and violate their constitutional rights and the Geneva Convention, while actually claiming to defend the Constitution, although all the other GOP candidates and even Hillary Clinton are also promoting "radicalization," by escalating bombings that inevitably incite more retaliation.

They don't seem to see that a lot of the previous attacks are forms of retaliation and that they’re only inciting even more retaliation. Ironically they have said recently that in order to get rid if ISIS they have to get rid of Bashar al-Assad since he is inciting them the same way the U.S. government is but they only acknowledge it when he does it. The 9/11 attacks, Boston Bombings, a recent knife attack in Britain, and another a few years ago where two people killed someone and stayed around to explain that they were doing this in retaliation for constant attacks on Muslim countries were all retaliatory attacks but the government refuses to admit that they’re inciting terrorists. In the one where they took the time to explain that their bombs were constantly killing innocent people and Muslims don't like it any more than we like it when they terrorize us it made it incredibly obvious yet few people seemed to recognize this.

The list of tyrants or terrorist organizations that the US government supported at one time or another often shortly before they turned against us is long including the Shah of Iran, Mubarak of Egypt, Mujaheddin, which became Al-Qada and the Taliban and even what we now call ISIS.

How obvious does it have to be that our foreign policy is absurd and counter productive?

Yet the media, political establishment and a large segment of the public is in Denial even though there have been numerous news reports documenting these activities, although once the relevance of many of them becomes obvious the mainstream media routinely stops repeating them and they're only reported in alternative media outlets. When people that review some of these news stories like How ISIS Was Created, It Will Make You Question Everything or many other reports, some more reliable than others, get attention, they're often ridiculed as conspiracy theorists; even if a lot of their research is more reliable than traditional media or came from the traditional media before they recognized their own blunders.

This denial often becomes routine when small children are often abused by those that love them or at least seem to love them, creating a pattern of co-dependence. It teaches them to respond with violence and accept, without question, what authority figures tell them often even when evidence indicates it is false, and even leads to increased willingness to go to war in much larger conflicts, often based on lies.

Teaching parents about the long term impacts of violence wouldn't solve all our immediate problems of course, but it would go a long way to reducing long term problems, and this needs to be done along with the short term solutions.

Planned Parenthood is in a good position to do some of this when they offer counselling to young parents; they could easily work more with organizations that study how to do this. With all the time they get on the media when incidents like this happen people like Cecile Richards could do more to educate the public about this. And of course the media could do this on their own without Planned Parenthood, inf act they should have been doing this all along if they're serious about providing a public service in return for free use of public airwaves they would have. The media is far more responsible for their incompetence and are clearly only concerned about maximizing profit and spreading propaganda judging by their actions.

Of course this isn't the only contributing cause to violence; but it is almost certainly the most important one by far; and there is research available on most if not all the other contributing causes and the mainstream media doesn't report on those either.