Notebook: The Brutalizing of America

We Americans have always been a violent people, quick to flare up in self-righteous anger and lash out at our enemies. We are brutal, too. But the kind of brutality to which I am referring is not primarily physical, although often its consequences are. Rather, I am concerned with the passive brutality of men who seem not to possess reason; men who are irrational, unthinking, without life or sensibility; men without souls. Sometimes such men jab electrified cattle prods into people, let loose dogs on them, or slam students to the ground with high pressure streams from fire hoses.

But those who participate in such ugly physical violence are not the only brutes. Violent redneck resistance to civil rights for Negroes is one mark of the brute; the polite businessmen who sneer at the suggestion that they should contribute a tiny percentage of their profits to help the poor are brutes too, dressed up in dinner jackets.

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