The horror! The horror! Reflections on our culture of violence and its implications for early development and...

This commentary draws on two dimensions of chronic community violence, with thoughts that have been mobilized by the foregoing contributions. One concerns the importance of culture and the other concerns the importance of thinking about early development. Culture permeates all of our actions, and we are in a culture of violence. In other papers in this issue, Richters and Martinez point out that the United States is the most violent country in the industrialized world, and Ciccheti and Lynch state that violence "is becoming a defining characteristic of American society." We are fascinated by violence and in an implicit way we love violence-a fact that we need to acknowledge. Our fascination with violence in American culture is permeating and deep, and, as horrible as it is, I believe we need to face it in order to try to counter it.