Reactionary

In blogs on servers in all fifty states and beyond, people are making comments on the latest big story: the Virgina Tech shootings. Tidbits of news are being discussed and analyzed to get at the WHY. Nice, pat little explanations are being discussed and passed along as if they were Wisdom. Some are saying it’s the guns, even so far as to use the beaten down adverb of “frighteningly” in a frighteningly cliched way. I’m sure there are people out there who are just like my grandmother who blames everything on the Drugs. Dropped out of school? Drugs! Held someone up? Drugs! Had a car accident in which an old woman was killed? Drugs! Hangnail? Drugs! And of course there are those who like to say it’s TV and keyboard psychologists who are diagnosing after the fact. A whole lot of good that does now.

I’m not making light of the situation. I have no explanations nor do I have a pathological need to have “solved” it. I think the causes have gotten bigger than just a lonely kid and a frighteningly easy-to-get gun. There have been plenty of lonely people in history and plenty of lonely people alive right now who have never even picked up a gun. Can we stop with the explanations and the diagnosing and the treating and the lip service? Clearly, that’s not helping.

A few more tidbits of my own:

• Why is this news? On the BBC no less. Will every shooting victim get their own personalized eulogy on one of the world’s largest news networks? No? Then there shouldn’t even be ONE. I hate this pandering to the so-called oppressed.
• Whatever happened to “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?” I’m tired of the decency police. Maybe it makes them feel better about themselves to be so irate over so small a thing as a word or two. Maybe it helps them live with themselves as the global environment goes from bad to worse and kids get shot in school and half of whole continents starve with no help from them. Whatever helps you sleep, man. But for the record, a lot of people on this earth have harder lives and shorter straws than you. Like those babies we took care of today.
• And now for the truly depressing. Does it bother no one else that what took so many years and lives to establish is just being pissed away in front of our eyes? Does that bother anyone? You can’t even hear the drums of doom over your TVs can you.

Posted on April 17th, 2007 under News •  Print •  Email • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback