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THE CAREFULLY SELECTED

EVILS OF OUR TIME

By Carroll Cox

Former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic stands before the world today accused of unspeakable crimes against humanity. I'm not here to make a case either for or against him, but I confess to being mystified about his status as the world's top bad guy. For the life of me I have never been able to figure out why his poor and tiny nation was selected as target practice for the high-tech U.S. military machine.

Okay, so a war was going on and bad things were happening to people.

But bad things are happening all over the world. Today there are more bloody internal wars and more refugee victims of violence than there were when the United Nations was formed 55 years ago, purportedly for the noble purpose of brokering global peace. Virtually all of Africa is in turmoil, ravaged by bloody tribal wars, starvation and Aids. Even "Democratic" South Africa, technically not at war, is one of the most violent places on earth, with a murder rate six times that of the United States and five times that of Russia. International drug cartels have made South Africa a new transshipment center.

Communist China, being prepared like a juicy feast to appease the hunger of U.S. corporate expansion, is certainly one of the world's most repressive and authoritarian regimes, its abuse of human rights managed and perfected to a fine art.

Palestine's Arafat and Israel's Sharon seem committed to ongoing atrocities against each other's people for reasons that appear eerily similar to the conflict on Milosevic's turf .. ethnic strife and historic territorial claims.

But of course reducing nonstrategic Kosovo to rubble and demonizing Milosevic was a far simpler political choice for U.S. intervention than is the case in the Middle East. On the one hand we have Israel with its tremendous political clout in the U.S. and recipient of more than a third of America¹s total annual foreign aid package. On the other hand we have Palestine with its link to the Arab world upon which the U.S. is dependent for a large portion of the oil it consumes.

So I don't think we'll be flattening either of those nations any time soon.

Then we have North Korea, whose leaders and their elite cohorts live in luxury while the vast majority of their people are slowly starving to death.

In fact, half the people in the world are suffering from insufficent nutrition.

In an era when countless small farmers go broke because "efficient" corporate farms have oversupplied the world food market, the only explanation for so many hungry people is an abundance of bad, bad leaders.

So why has Milosevic been singled out as the epitome of evil? Heck, we could light up the stage and have an unending performance of world trials against bad guys.

But then we've always been highly selective in choosing our ogres and keeping them in the public eye. Germany's Hitler, for example, has occupied the spotlight of evil for sixty years, though the extent of his genocidal practices pales in comparison to the number of humans wiped out by Russia's Stalin and China's Mao Tse Tung.

On the domestic front, too, American evils are carefully selected, packaged and promoted. Not a day goes by that the anointed twin beasts of guns and tobacco are not evoked from news desks, advertisements and corporate and political soothsayers.

Meanwhile, other deadly beasts are all but ignored.

This year the government finally admitted that obesity and inactivity-related health problems may be killing as many Americans as smoking-related problems. Half of Americans are overweight. Especially alarming to health experts is the increase in child obesity. And as a nation we're getting fatter and more sedentary every year. Insight magazine (4/16/01, reported that Dr. James R. Gavin, a leading authority on diabetes, said Americans are "writing the script for health disaster with a culture based on convenience and inactivity. Just look at what we've created," Dr. Gavin said. "An infrastructure in which it is now possible for a child to never be challenged by physical activity.... They don't have to walk to school. They don't do physical education at school. They don't have to walk to the store. In the malls they park themselves in the videogame room and sit there moving only a finger." (All the boys involved in school shootings over the last few years played violent video games.) "At home," continued Dr. Gavin, "what do they do? They watch television."

One in 50 kids now has diabetes, an ailment almost unheard of in children just ten years ago. According to U.S. News and World Report (6/25), diabetes among Americans overall is up 40 percent in the last decade, 70 percent up in people in their 30s! Just a few years ago diabetes was almost entirely an affliction of the elderly. Among the many health problems resulting from diabetes which afflicts 16 million people now, is the quadrupling of the risk of heart disease and strokes. Diabetes is responsible for 90,000 amputations a year!

So, do we hear daily lectures and "smelly, puking" commercials protesting, as someone said, "the avalanche of (greasy puking) junk food, (fattening, body- rotting) soft drinks and the plague of (slothful, sick-making) inactivity?"

No, at least not yet. Could it be because money from the production of convenience food and goods supports politicians and pays the bills for newspapers and television?

But we let the genie out of the bottle when we politicized and enshrined tobacco and guns as expedient chosen evils. Even politicians will one day realize that there is a limit to the number of industries that can be successfully demonized.

A book could be written about the hypocrisy in our selection of evils, but I'll mention just one more.

Drugs.

The much publicized and very expensive Drug War keeps a lot of people employed as the result of our selection of illegal drugs as an anointed evil. During the costly length of the Drug War, teenage gangs have proliferated. In the 1970s, only six U.S. cities reported serious problems with youth gangs. Today 25,000 cities have major problems!

And how about the almost total silence on the effects of legal drugs? A report by the Center of Disease Control casually mentioned in the June 22 Wall Street Journal said that side effects from properly administered legal drugs were responsible for an annual 600,000 hospital admissions and 700,000 emergency room visits. 100,000 people a year die from the side affects of legal drugs!

If the U.S. insists on clinging to its self-imposed role as the nanny authority of the earth, in the interest of fairness and justice, shouldn't equal time be given to all dangers? To all things that may harm or kill? To every atrocity and injustice? Shouldn't we do something about the evil leaders all over the world who abuse and kill people? How about those who enjoy splendid luxury and Swiss bank accounts, often at U.S. taxpayer expense, while their populations go hungry?

Our idiotic selectivity earns us jeers and contempt from our children who are so quick to spot hypocrisy, and increasing resentment and even hatred from around the world.

So.......someone please enlighten me....what is it about Milosevic and Kosovo.........?

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