the bistro off broadway

Cleveland Plain Dealer
Make schools harder targets by giving them the means to fight back
By Kevin OBrien, The Plain Dealer
Thursday, December 20, 2012 

After a horrific event like last week's mass murder at a Connecticut school, two questions immediately arise: "Why?" and "What are we going to do about it?" 

There are correct answers to both. How many such incidents it takes to drive us to them remains to be seen. 

Here's "why": 

We live in and promote a society that routinely dehumanizes people. 

A thriving abortion industry kills a million American children every year, because they are seen as inconveniences rather than the people they are. 

Murders and other violent crimes are commonplace, with the victims' humanity ignored. 

A direct connection to school shootings? Of course not. An environmental connection? Absolutely. Pope John Paul II was sadly astute when he called out the culture of death. 

We also live in a society besotted with voyeurism. 

On "reality" TV shows, people scheme or suffer in a made-for-television universe where morality and ethics are so badly skewed as to be unrecognizable -- or are simply suspended altogether. 

It's all for our entertainment, but it isn't merely entertainment. It is toying with the real lives and the real emotions of the real people on the screen. Yet it's so easy to suspend belief in their humanity -- their personal reality. That they are volunteers doesn't make it a healthy idea. 

Finally, our society is woefully lacking in humility and marinated in misguided hubris. 

Our public educational system, especially, encourages people to consider themselves the final and unimpeachable arbiters of what's true, what's right, what's moral, what's fair, what's desirable. Entertainers and athletes flout the laws of God and man, yet only rarely do we see them called to account. 

In the odd instance in which they are brought up short, voyeurism takes over again. Ask Lindsay Lohan, who actually is a real person. 

Violent video games may be a problem for people who cannot understand the difference between pixels and people, but they seem a most unlikely incitement to kill among people who know what's objectively right from what's objectively wrong. 

Among people who think only in terms of "what's right for me" -- well, now there we may have a problem… 

Read the rest of the article at the Cleveland Plain Dealer


 
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