Yesterday, while I paused for a few moments to post a link to startling images that I feel puts the trivial issues of daily life into an overwhelming perspective of complete insignificance, something horrible was happening on a college campus in Virginia. Only 6 months ago, almost to the day, I wrote about the impact a shooting at a children’s school in Pennsylvania had on me, and those words and thoughts bear repeating today. I went back and re-read them and they echo how I feel, just as I did only half a year ago.
Tonight, my wife and I talked briefly about the events today. Also, a post at theshapeofdays.com, a blog I read regularly, touched on the concept of blame that tends to arise.
Personally, I have to wonder if we’re all not collectively to blame for being complacent and tolerant of the decline if not the disappearance of moral boundaries in our daily lives and the media that pervades them. It’s sickening to compare what was ‘acceptable’ a mere 25 years ago and what we see, view, say and hear daily today. I strongly believe that the continue presentation of violence as entertainment, and the extremely graphic depictions that are allowed, contribute to a desensitized populace. Just as one example: it’s become so bad that we frequently rely on TiVo’s fast forward feature in order to skip past the gruesome and disturbing images used just in trailers for many of the films being made these days.
Yes, people snap. Over lovers quarrels, being slighted, feeling like outcasts, or family abuse. People snap. They have historically and will continue to do so. But for some reason, barring my own ignorance of the metrics, it seems like the frequency of people’s reactions to the pressures they’re feeling leading to pickup up a weapon and taking lives, even random lives, seems to be greatly on the rise.
My brother was living with a woman in the late 1980’s. He, she and her roommate, Glenda, worked at ESL. Both his girlfriend and Glenda were close to our family and we all spent time together having dinners, drinks and just socializing. My brother had moved out after the relationship soured, but not long before Richard Farley walked into ESL on a morning in February and went on a shooting spree, killing seven innocent people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time, one of which was Glenda. It shocked our family, the community, and the nation. It seemed unbelievable and inconceivable, as things like that just “did not happen”.
Now it’s worked it’s way up to being something we’re seeing a couple times a year.
What’s changed? Really…. what’s changed that’s somehow contributed to this being more common place? Why do schools need metal detectors? Why does the preschool my children attend need to have, for god sake, a contingency plan in place should a shooting incident arise?
WTF? And what will change the trend?
