The Enraged Society

Photo credit: The Toyota SUV that hung on my car’s bumper for many miles. License plate has been edited out. Howard Lisnoff

The Enraged Society

Originally posted at my website The Last New Leftist:

https://thelastnewleftist.com/the-enraged-society/

Aggressive driving on US roads is a given. Drive anywhere and at any time, and drive at the speed limit, whatever that is— 45 mph or 65 mph— and like with our foreign and domestic policy, some level of intimidation and violence will happen. Yesterday, July 11, 2025, our car was trailed by someone hanging on our bumper at 65 mph for 20 miles, give or take a few unaccounted miles. The incident took place on I-90, the Mass Pike. Yesterday it was a red Volkswagen sedan; in late January 2024, it was the Toyota SUV pictured above. There is no credible way to track road rage, as it’s a pervasive occurrence in the US.

In a retail warehouse a brief time later, the aggressive behavior on the road is readily seen in the huge shopping carts pushed as if all of the surrounding people were enemies or didn’t exist. The aggression is everywhere, and so are the guns, but less so in Massachusetts, where gun laws stop some of the Wild West behavior.

In the US gun violence and result deaths are astronomically high:

Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While the number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the second consecutive year, it remained among the highest annual totals on record (Pew Research Center, March 5, 2025).

Wars, organized violence for both defensive and offensive reasons, usually tied to profit, greed, and the extension of empire, have been the hallmark of US foreign policy since the end of World War II, the last war involving a just cause in US history. Between open and secret wars, whether against Iran, or in support of Israel’s murderous genocide in the Gaza Strip, or the many proxy wars from Ukraine to Syria and beyond, involving the regular military and the CIA and other so-called intelligence agencies, the wars of empire continue. How many trillions of dollars in weapons these wars involve is impossible to precisely gauge. The Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute is a good place to begin to measure the immense sums of national wealth and treasure that flow to weapons manufacturers here. The project’s summary page highlights the human costs and dollar costs of war over many decades. This is the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower named at the end of his presidency. Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, just under a million people have died in US open and proxy wars. The genocide in Gaza has killed several hundred thousand people, including children, women, and men who are noncombatants. The laws of war, such as the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, and Nuremberg Principles, have been turned into a comedic script, except for the innocent dead. It took thousands of years of human development and evolution to come to a consensus on the rules or laws of war, and the US and others have thrown them to the wind. Israel and Russia are among the many other culprits, but only the tip of the iceberg of violence, as countries such as England, France, and Germany, to name a few, are not very far behind and active cheerleaders for war in Ukraine and Gaza.

William Bloom’s Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (2003) is covered in this video. I find the video annoying for its use of clichés, but reading the text is taxing, as its discussion of war after war after war is difficult to read, and Bloom doesn’t miss a beat in treating all US wars, both open and proxy.