Witch-Hunt Hysteria
Fear as a Weapon
What happens when violence doesn't scare you anymore?

Sixteenth Century - "The greatest sexual sin apparently was birth control, whether as contraception or abortion... Midwives were taunted, 'How many children have you destroyed?" Witchcraze by Anne Llewellyn Barstow
Twentieth Century - "'More violence is inevitable and it is righteous,' says C. Roy McMillan, a Mississippi activist whose obstetrician wife once performed abortions. 'It wouldn't bother me if every abortionist in the country today fell dead from a bullet.'" "The Rhetoric of Terror," Time Magazine, March 27, 1995.

We are living in a time in which we seek to blame others rather than address the wrongs ourselves. Rather than seeking to overcome our own problems which seem so insurmountable, we attack those that stand for what we do not, and the more passionately, vehemently we do so, the more we seek moral corroboration for our own violence. There is an Abortion Hysteria in this country. Everything is predicated by fear. To be a doctor in a clinic means putting your life on the line, knowing that someone like Paul Hill may be waiting for you around the next corner, waiting with the words that he will murder you for being a murderer, and not seeing the blinding contradictions and egregious philosophical blunders inherent in claiming that his religion tells him that it condones his violent actions. Vigilante style justice is not just something used by terrorists or used for shock effect in action movies, in fact there is no reaction to the violence, we have all become desensitized to the look of it, the fact of it: sitcoms, cartoons, the soaps, videogames, and talkshows.



It is the ubiquitous American pastime, and spectator sport with redundant team colors - red on red. Increasingly the daily news reveals to us that your next door neighbor might be the next to crack. He knows how to do it, he knows where to get the gun, and he's seen it done before in a plethora of fancy styles. This is not something new, it's been around for a very long time. Sometimes it's necessary to look to the past in order to remind yourself of where the future is going, and what's going to happen once we get there. It not always as shiny and plastic as it seems, as sometimes when you say to yourself, "that sort of thing would never happen now," you have to be able to hear the answer that you fear most.

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