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Homegrown Terror and Government Manipulation: Their Impact on Society

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Homegrown Terror and Government Manipulation: Their Impact on Society
Homegrown Terror & Government Manipulation: Their Impact on Society For generations, people have been astonished and affected by events that have transpired into influential elements of their time and times to come. The 20th and 21st Centuries are filled with many historic and controversial people and events which have drastically shaped and changed the way people live their everyday life in today’s world. Important people and events that contributed to and are responsible for the unfavorable change of the mid-20th Century are Charles Starkweather and the Bay of Pigs Invasion, becoming the first of their kinds. Each separately and significantly impacted the generation’s society of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Even though the 21st Century is in progress, the events and key people of earlier generations still impact the generations of today’s society with the addition of many comparable and contrastable people and events of modern times. Opposition of the video game surge has targeted the “Grand Theft Auto” series as being violent and destructive to children’s development and behavior, while the “D.C. Sniper” has instilled fear of homegrown terror in the United States. Unfortunately, the American people must live in insecurity and over cautiousness because as history describes today’s society, anything can and will happen. Charles Starkweather was the youngest person, as a teenager, to go on a killing spree in America, in which he murdered over ten people. Starkweather was born on November 24, 1938 “…into a poor, uneducated, but hardworking family from Lincoln, Nebraska” (Bardsley 2). In school, he was labeled a “loser” and was often times bullied because of his bowed legs, speech impediment, and his slowness of learning. It turns out he was not a slow learner because they later found out that he had suffered from severe myopia, an eye disease. As he aged through junior high and high school, he directed all of his attention to fighting, while blaming


Cited: Bardsley, Marilyn. “Charles Starkweather & Caril Fugate.” The Crime Library. 2008. TruTV. 1 Dec. 2008 “Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate Trials: 1958 † Tough Background, Hostage or Killer.” Great American Trials. Vol. 2. 2008. Law Library. 1 Dec. 2008 Fourteen Days in October: The Cuban Missile Crisis. 1997. 4 Dec. 2008 Freedman, Lawrence. Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Cable News Network. 8 Dec. 2008 Mottes, Chris 19 Jun. 2007. 6 Dec. 2008 Sierra, Jerry A Media. 30 Apr. 2008. IDG Entertainment. 6 Dec. 2008

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