More Violence in the here and now

that the evidence of “premeditation and planning” of the attack “implies that the resources the

people of Nataruk had at the time were valuable and worth fighting for…this shows that two of

the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies – control of territory and resources

were probably the same for these hunter gatherers…” The co-author of this study, Marta

Mirazon Lahr, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, noted that “what we see at the

prehistoric site of Nataruk is no different from the fights, wars and conquests that shaped so

much of our history, and indeed sadly continue to shape our lives.”

More Violence in the here and now

But one doesn’t have to travel back tens of thousands of years to witness this type of

violence over resources. Although not in the same class of organized warfare, news outlets

regularly report stories of patrons in fast food or grocery stores getting into heated arguments and

sometimes deadly physical confrontations when ordering and buying food. On October 16,

2018, a customer stabbed a South Carolina restaurant employee multiple times over a food order

(Kulmala, 2018). The Inside Edition (IE) news program reported that “some fast food restaurants

look more like a battleground than a place to grab a quick bite.” Citing Bureau of Labor

Statistics studies, IE reported that fast food violence events “are not isolated incidents. Assaults on

fast food workers have doubled in five years.”

Competition for resources happens outside of the stores as well. Violent confrontations

between store patrons over limited car parking spaces in many different cities occur with

regularity; some of them turning deadly as in summer of 2018, when an unarmed Florida man

was gunned down in front of his young son by another man after having a dispute over a parking

space. Police say the killer was justified, according to the state’s “stand your ground” law

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGQQ3DY97w).

In another story, a surveillance camera recorded a young woman in Texas being viciously

beaten by a large man during an argument over a parking space. According to the story a “Texas

man beat Anjelica Lozano multiple times and hurled her small body onto the road in San

Antonio.” After seeing the man kick her mother Norma's car the young lady walks over and

punches him in the side of the face. The man reacts slamming her head against another vehicle

then punches her several times in the head and body before she falls to the ground (Simpson,

2018).

Being in a moving car is does not shield one from violence. Road rage is a global problem

and a “‘serious public health crisis’ according to Leon James, a professor of psychology at the

University of Hawaii who has studied road rage for three decades. And it's going to continue to

get worse, unfortunately, because our cultural tradition is to see the other driver as the enemy"

(Marrero, 2016). A study conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, reports that

“there are more than 1,200 incidents of road rage on average reported per year in the United

States, a number of which have ended with serious injuries or even fatalities. These rates rose

yearly throughout the six years of the study; a number of studies have found that individuals with

road rage were predominantly young (33 years old on average) and 96.6% male.” In total:

More than 78% of U.S. drivers reported having engaged in at least one aggressive driving behavior at least once in the past year. The most common such behaviors, reported by roughly half of all drivers, were purposely tailgating another vehicle, yelling at another driver, and honking their horn ‘to show annoyance or anger.”’

Approximately one-third of all respondents indicated that they had made an angry gesture at another driver. Approximately one in four drivers reported that they had purposely tried to block another driver from changing lanes, and 11.9% reported that they had cut off another vehicle on purpose. A small proportion of drivers even admitted to engaging in behaviors beyond the scope of general aggressive driving and which may be considered road rage: 3.7% of drivers reported that they had exited their vehicle to confront another driver, and 2.8% reported that they had bumped or rammed another vehicle on purpose” (http://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Prevalence-of-AggressiveDrivig-2014.pdf).