"America is so violent, because their wallpaper is so ugly." Stephen Fry (supposedly quoting Oscar Wilde, unverified.)

it's easier to judge if something is beautiful than if it's good or evil. Now nature on it's own is beautiful, except where man is involved. Man seems to ruin everything around him. Would a speicies not be violent if everything it touches it inadvertantly destroys?

The native americans, while violent and ugly to each other, lived fairly harmoniously with nature. Then the europeans came, with slaves, harsh religion, and superiority complexes. They ruined the land to make farms, and filthy cities, mined the beautiful mountains and cliffs into burnt wreckage. So the natives fought violently against the "enlightened" europeans. The europeans of course posessing better armaments, usually won and pushed the natives further and further in to the desolate reaches of the states and beyond.

Then America wanted to expand. They wanted to expand in to the beautiful untamed wilderness. What did they do when they got there, brought the ugliness they had left back east with them. Repeat the above parts with the natives ad nauseum.

Eventually it was bound to happen that one form of ugliness, slavery, would come in conflict with anther form of ugliness, industry, and so Civil War. Hideous and violent atrocities are committed on both sides. Again it comes down to who can make the more efficient killing machine, and the north wins an ugly victory, having desolated the south. The slaves were freed, a beautiful moment, only to be marred by their maintained repression do to the ugliness of racism.

The ugliness prevails until America invents the ultimate ugliness, Nuclear Weapons! A weapon so vile and heinous, it's use will not only reduce a city to rubble, but poison the earth and air for generations

Then momentary burst of beauty in the sixties: civil rights, and nonviolent protest for peace. America put aside it's ugliness long enough to do something no society had done before, we stretched out our hands and touched the heavens, a very beautiful moment. Then America brought back it's ugly ways with more corrupt government, corporate greed, pollution of our world, and violence. This trend seems to continue to the present day.

Americans are violent because they are surrounded by ugliness, Nay I say, humanity as a whole. Perhaps it's time we all did something to make this world a little more beautiful.