Thoughts on Newtown- Sandy Hook

With the recent horrific mass murder at an elementary school in Newtown, CT, Americans are wondering just what exactly IS going on in our country, hoping that this latest tragedy is not a mere preliminary apex of a horrible trend that could get even worse.  Well, I certainly cannot identify precisely what is going on, but I can certainly point out some existing conditions, in no particular order, that create a climate where these events are more likely to occur.

There's a devaluation of life, both in the celebration of the hunting of innocent animals for "sport" and in the legalization of the murder of the unborn.

There's the NRA, an organization that has bastardized the Second Amendment to the extent of allowing the general public access to high-powered, rapid-firing weapons.

There are pro-Choice advocates, who defend a woman's "right-to-choose," some of whom even bemoan occasions when the number of abortions trend downward.

We have a culture of extremism, where video games, various forms of entertainment (music, movies, TV, porn), sports, etc are becoming more violent, more graphic, more sexual, and more permissive under the guise of Free Speech (AKA-making a buck) for a unsatiated nation eager for an even more intense level of absolute crap. (A point I cannot resist making, although it does not really fit into the theme of this blog: notice how conservatives who attack 1st Amendment Free Speech rights and liberals who attack the 2nd Amendment state how the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the weaponry or the forms of mass media that would be invented when drafting the U.S. Constitution but point to the Fathers' wisdom when the amendment validates their interests?)

It's a culture that values our worth based on being "somebody," with fatuous definitions of what it truly means, as a philosophical friend asks, to be good and to be happy.

It's a culture which demonstrates with increasing frequency that the line between celebrity and notoriety gets weaker and weaker, and that pathways to fame require not superior skill honed by hard work or by making a positive contribution to the greater good of society, but through boorish, stupid, and/or extreme behavior.

It's the deemphasis of the sense of us as a united nation, of community, and of patriotism, a trend that began in the late 1960's, and accelerated rapidly by the Internet, social media, and political extremism.  We are now encouraged to highlight what makes us "unique" at the expense of what binds us together, at least until a tragedy such as 9/11 or Newtown "reminds" us that, hey, we are all in this thing.

It's the deemphasis of God in society.  Whether those who believe God is as real as Kris Kringle care to admit it or not, learning about Jesus Christ's teachings and the Ten Commandments serves as a wonderful exemplar of thinking morally.  Empathy and the Golden Rule are also exemplars.

It's many not being taught to think of each individual as someone who has value, who's capable of love, with feelings and goals and dreams and families who they love and who love them (and how sad it is if they do not have this)- instead converted nowadays to faceless casualities of the collaterial damage of war and faceless statistics of laid-off workers of the collateral damage of a heartless, out-of-whack economy based on what your stock is worth.

It's the decline of the family, it's living in a country that LOVES its guns (the recent Black Friday period saw 283,000+ guns sold, a record for Black Fridays), it's where a large portion of the population believes the solution to preventing violence is more guns, despite the statistics showing that guns are a mere solution to violence (note difference), it's, it's,...it seems as if, instead of attempting to find THE reason why extreme events such as Newtown occur, I decided to use the tragedy as an excuse to list some gripes.  However, when extreme events occur, they seem to occur mostly in our increasingly extreme country, and when I read the solution of many for preventing further Newtowns is to arm school personnel, I know not a damned thing has been learned.