This morning my news aggregator greeted me with the following headlines:
Teen gunman kills 5 in Utah mall
Four dead in murders-suicide at Philadelphia firm
Phoenix grandfather shoots grandkids, friend; kills 2
Teen gunman kills 5 in Utah mall
Four dead in murders-suicide at Philadelphia firm
Phoenix grandfather shoots grandkids, friend; kills 2
Good morning, America!
Welcome to a country where disagreements and slights are responded to with violence. Where disgruntled employees kill their coworkers. Where bullied teens kill their peers. Where warring parents kill their children.
I’m not here to judge the perpetrators. Clearly someone who commits such heinous acts is suffering from some mental instability. But I would plea with others feeling such intense anger to hurt themselves before they hurt others. Or, even better, to get some help before anyone gets hurt.
I don’t understand what is accomplished by taking others’ lives when your endgame is to kill yourself. Your death will bring pain to your loved ones, even if you don’t believe anyone will care. Why extend that suffering to other families or your community at large? There is no glory in going out in a hail of gunfire. There is no fame attached to your name, unless being remembered as a monster is the legacy you wish to leave.
The arguments, the slights will still go unresolved. There is no resolution in violent endings. All that is left is anger bred by anger, which will certainly simmer until it reaches a boiling point and another deadly headline is written.
I’m certainly no authority on the topic. I haven’t been personally affected by this type of violence and can only imagine the lasting pain it inflicts on witnesses, survivors and victims’ families.
Compared to other countries, we have it good. We don’t live in Iraq, where people take their lives into their hands just by stepping outside. Our children aren’t kidnapped and turned into violent killers, like so many are in Colombia, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
But maybe that’s what is so disturbing: The fact that we are a country supposedly living in peace, far from the wars in which we are engaged, yet there is no peace in our communities. Every town at some point will be shattered by some form of senseless violence.
Because it is senseless. It is pointless. It is heartless.
Yet, none of us will feel safe until we make sense of it … until we wake up to happier headlines.
3 comments:
totally agree. it IS horrible. the after-math and copy-cating is terrible as well. our school was named as a target today and we were under lock down. you would think horrendous things like what happened at trolley would help people come to their senses and invoke some sort of sympathy or empathy ...instead of giving them ideas. i would like to blame drugs and violent video games. i bet that 19-year-old half expected those people to come back to life at the end of the game. there's no accountability. (down with grand theft auto!)
well, game over, buddy.
I agree with the Mrs. Dub and Mrs. r. But at least in the midst of all the violence and self absorbtion there is the occasional off duty cop willing to leave his pre-Valentines dinner with his wife and risk his life and by so doing reduce the likely number of casualties by many fold. Or one adolescent friend who describes a white pick up with such detail as to bring two lost boys home again. And supremely, one who voluntarily submitted to violence and death no one could forcibly inflict on Him, to provide the only hope for lasting triumph of the peace he heralded, practiced, and promised over the violent, selfish, beyond-feeling world that dominates the headlines and intrudes upon every life.
I agree, what tragedies. I was pretty down about these things for a while, especailly the Trolly Square incident since I've been to that mall numerous times. But like p daddy said, we have to focus on the positive. Sometimes that's hard to do.
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