I'm not talking about America only although that's what the illustration says. The usual cliche is "the world is going to hell in a handbasket" but sometimes it seems that America, which likes to think of itself as THE world leader, is headed there fast and pulling the rest of the world along.
I'm on this tack today because I've been thinking about the film mentioned a few posts ago: The 11th Hour. It's message is that ecologically the world is truly a quarter mile (or a quarter of a century) from hell. The ecological messages are dire and I believe they are entirely correct. [Go to that post and click the link to being able to see the film free on the Internet.] We, individuals are a part of that ecology too and we as a group are suffering along this road. We are eating, drinking, inhaling and taking drugs, both physician prescribed and recreationally, things that are very bad for and are changing our physical, emotional and mental being in the world. We have epidemics of diseases only a few people had before: asthma, autism, Alzheimer's -- and that's just a part of the A list. We have PTSD and "personality disorders" that were much rarer fifty years ago.
And that brings me to today's headline that makes me want to shout at some idiot who wrote it and seems to expect it to explain something: That the shooter of 20 kindergarten children had "a personality disorder." Murdering small children is something other than a mere personality disorder! The rash of shootings (five in the last six months) and each more horrible than the former is a societal disorder. A symptom of something awful in our world. There have always been madmen, always been murderers but this is bigger than crazy individuals. I do not believe in supernatural forces; I believe in natural and societal forces and in volatile, often violent, mental states. We, the human race, have concocted a lethal world so complex there can only be partial answers.
![http://zionstrumpet.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03... ]](http://zionstrumpet.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/8-3-10-to-hell-in-a-handbasket.bmp){kind=link}
4 comments:
Like you, I worry about the affects of all this on children but I see this:
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died as a result of policies the USA employed during it's take over of Iraqi oil, first through Hussein and then getting rid of him later.
Being a victim of the first school shooting in 1979, I have a voice that tells me the kids doing the shooting have been neglected in some way by a society made blind and deaf to them, a selfish society run by oligarchs who do not care where they take America and it's people, just so long as the money and power is in their own hands.
With so little regard shown for children, in generally, by the powerful interests that pull strings daily in our government, I'm not at all surprised that these things are still happening. Nothing has really changed in all these years.
Thank you,Zippieknits, you have voice of considered experience. And ou are essentially seconding my belief that this is a societal illness. I think it's not just kids, but the lost children are especially painful to think about.
There is an amount of responsibily here that I totally believe has a great deal of it and that is the movie capital. These movie stars must begin to refuse to do scripts of violence, murder, lust and now the games kids play.When do parents step?
In my opinion that too many of these money hungery Hollywood "Stars" will tell you Freedom of Speech, this is not what our forefathers meant. I read an opinion today where someone said that the movies need to show us what is going on in the world with violence so we can better understand it. Baloney.
Our Freedom of Speech needs an addendum to it.
Di, the President basically agrees with you that movies influence kids toward violence, he said so almost immediately.
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