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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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