Bubbles
Us
Mon, April 16, 2007 - 12:30 PMWHAT???
Are we so conditioned to accept irrational violence and loss of life we don't even give it a passing thought?
What have we done to ourselves.
Mon, April 16, 2007 - 12:30 PM -
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Mon, April 16, 2007 - 6:59 PM
I am sorry that this seems unusual to you. What is wrong is that we have a culture which glorifies violence, easy access to guns, expert training through video games and a populace who does not know how to defend themselves. Combine that with a social system that teaches and reinforces male violence and a total lack of mental health care and this is what we get.
I'm actually kind of surprised it doesn't happen more often. A lot of people are thinking about this very hard, but I doubt that any of the lessons will take. |
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Mon, April 16, 2007 - 10:26 PM
I didn't say it was unusual. I said it was fucked up. I refuse to accept that this is acceptable behavior.
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Tue, April 17, 2007 - 11:57 AM
Oh yeah. No argument there.
I've been surprised at how much more this incident has upset me than the Iraq war, which often kills many times as many people each day. All are quite messed up, but I suspect a lot of people are thinking about this one pretty hard right now. At least I hope so. I couldn't help but notice how much more compassionate GWB sounded when talking about this incident than he did after the WTC collapse. I'd like to think someone in power may be growing a humanity, but suspect it is just better speechwriters. |
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Tue, April 17, 2007 - 1:46 PM
Or an upcoming election.
The difference between this and 9/11 is, although it was our own seriously fucked up foreign policy that brought about that act of terrorism, the people behind it were not Americans. They were not our children. They were not our children killing our children. We can try to shift all the blame for 9/11 on to radicals and terrorists and decades of foreign policy and big oil business that we claim to be powerless to change, but these are our children. This one hits home. I read stuff like this and the first thing I do is check on my kid sister and a friend in North Carolina, both at state schools. I accept that my generation is completely ill prepared to raise children. We didn't have a lot to go on from our live free hippy parents. Every kid now is on Ritalin or Prozac or diagnosed bi-polar or ADHD or what the hell ever else they come up with tomorrow. They are CHILDREN. Children are hyper and easily distractable, and they push your buttons and their boundaries to figure out who they are. Drugging them because you can't handle it is NOT A VALID RESPONSE. A generation of children with a sense of entitlement yet no sense of real value, and absolutely NO idea how to deal with their emotions. And twenty years later we have young adults now who are so incapable of dealing with the stresses of real life that the only way they find to express their anger at the world is by killing everyone else. Yes, we'll still be talking about this for years to come, because try as we might, we can't point our fingers at anyone else for this one. |