Grand Theft Narrative and Call of Red Herring...

  Over the last several days, I've seen a number of opinions in the social media regarding why the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting occurred, what led up to it, and what might have prevented it. I wish I could say there was an answer among them. It would be wonderful if there were a simple cause that could be identified and changed which would make atrocities like this a thing of the past. We all wish it were that simple.
  Unfortunately, most of the opinions I have seen read like a greatest hits album of "how to fix these out-of-control whipper-snapper kids out there." It's the music they're listening to! It's the lack of good, Christian prayer in schools! It's them dang, dirty video games!
  All of these thoughts, while well-meaning, are over-simplifications and they don't address the larger, socio-psychological issues that face our times. It just isn't that simple.
  I can't address all of these in this blog because I haven't the time or the inclination. I'm also no expert, and I don't pretend to be. I do feel qualified to speak to the subject of violent video games, however, as I am an avid gamer myself, and I know exactly what people are referring to when they speak of the senseless violence contained in them.
  Two of my favorite video games franchises of all time are repeatedly pointed to as red flag games that desensitize people to extreme violence. Those are the Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty games. While I agree those games depict extreme violence both very realistically and on a constant basis, I cannot agree that the solution is to remove them from store shelves entirely.
  The fact of the matter is, the responsibility to keep these games away from impressionable youths is still on the parents. If your child isn't mature enough to separate reality from fantasy he or she should not be allowed to play these games. Not at home, and not at a friend's house. It is your job as a parent to know these things and act accordingly.
   There are those who suggest these games are just as bad for some adults to play, I agree. There are adults in the world with twisted minds who cannot separate what is real from what is fiction. Those adults are sick, and they need mental health-care. This is not a question of removing games from the world, as these individuals would simply gain their fantasy-violence input from movies or TV shows or the like. Without proper mental health evaluations, these people will continue to glean inspiration for possible violent acts from anything from books to movies to the nightly news. Call of Duty is just the easiest thing to blame because of its subject matter.
  In short, I wish we could just pull some products from shelves and violence would be a thing of the past. We cannot. For many of us, gaming is a cathartic stress release akin to screaming into a pillow or beating on a punching bag. Some of us, myself included, don't have the luxury or physical ability to undertake more active forms of stress release, and video games are a great help. I can't run off the stresses of life on a treadmill, but I charge into combat on my PS3 and feel better after a three minute round of multiplayer Call of Duty. This works for me and I am more than capable of realizing that my behavior in the real world and my activities on the screen are separate and very different things. I would hope most of my teammates and adversaries know the difference as well.

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Thoughts on Newtown...

  Here we are again. This time it isn't a couple of wounded and two or three killed. It's dozens. Most of them babies of five or six years old. It is not an accident those children are dead. He targeted them. He. Targeted. Children. They weren't collateral damage. He killed exactly who he meant to.
  Predictably, we were not a full twenty-four hours out from this heinous atrocity before Facebook and Twitter were clogged with every possible and retread argument about how this could have been prevented. Calls for more gun control. Calls for less. Suggestions that teachers and principals should be armed. And, most curiously, the suggestion that this wouldn't have happened if God were "allowed" in schools. Basically, all the same old nonsense Red Herrings we hear and read about every time someone decides to kill a lot of people. It doesn't hold up this time, people. It just doesn't.
  The fact of the matter is there is nothing to be learned here. We cannot reason away this event or create a context in which we can be made to understand it. This is nothing short of absolute, undiluted, unfiltered evil, and your philosophical/ideological/religious opinions or theories do not in any way enter into this. What you see is what you get, and what you get is utter, black-hearted madness.
  Yes, after this there will no doubt be, at the very least, a robust argument in Washington about reinstating the assault-weapons ban that expired in 1994. Yes, there will probably be an attempt to draft up some symbolic piece of legislation seeking to improve mental health screenings for potential gun buyers or increased scrutiny to people applying for handgun permits, and so on and so forth. Those things may very well be good things that need to happen. This writer hopes those discussions happen. But none of it matters at all.
  It doesn't matter because there will still be twenty-six souls lost. Twenty of them the souls of babies whose parents will never see them graduate high school and go to college and give them grand-children. There is no piece of legislation or talk radio panel discussion that can make that right.
  In the end, the damage is done and it is irreparable. There is no coming back from this, and though only one finger was on the trigger, we all bear some of the responsibility for those victims. We bear the responsibility because we created the society that allowed it. No, we don't condone this, but we didn't stop it either. We are the society that created the circumstances which ultimately added up to twenty dead children and six dead adults who were tasked with the protection, instruction, and guidance of those babies.
  It is not an isolated event, but rather the culmination of a series of events in an American life. If any number of factors had been altered ever so slightly, we would not be where we are today, all of us with blood on our hands. We didn't pull the trigger, but we most certainly helped create the person who did. With our complacency. With our self-obsessiveness. With our cold indifference to our fellow man. We are none of us innocents.
  A butterfly flaps its wings in California, and a town in Connecticut will never, ever be the same. And neither will any of us. I wish I had more to say about this, but words fail me. I think I'll just wear this sadness like a cloak for a while. To be happy now feels unclean. God help us, if you're up there. God help America.

The Truth, Brought To You By...

  First of all, I know what you're thinking. "Thank Odin he's returned! I thought we would never again behold the wisdom of that golden-penned wordsmith! Whatever have we done without him?!"
  I hope most of you survived this drought with your psyches intact. I know there were definitely some casualties. There are bound to be when people are left to fend for themselves without proper guidance. Let's just remember the fallen fondly and move on, shall we? We shall. Indeed, we must!
  Now, since it has been such a long vacation and most of you are still on slacker-time, I will keep today's lesson relatively simple. We'll get into the hard stuff next time. For now, just try to stay awake, and, for chrissakes stop drooling on your desks. Honestly...
  So lately I've noticed a few disturbing trends I think we should all be made aware of. Awareness, after all, is the first step to solving any problem. Just ask those highly affective problem-solving whiz-kids over at the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Those guys have been kickin' ass and takin' names for over twenty-five years. If I have learned nothing else from them, it's that getting a bunch of pre-teens crammed into a cafeteria for a one hour "awareness" presentation  can stop the flow of high-grade Colombian cocaine into American cities dead in its tracks. But I digress...
  I don't want to discuss drugs today. I just know without them I would be a train-wreck. Thanks, Doc.  Rather, I want to discuss the way we interpret the stories we read in the paper or see on the news and the bias those media impart on us. Subliminally, perhaps, they subtly sway our opinions with the simplest things. A turn of phrase. An extra bit of unnecessary information which adds nothing to the story except to direct your view-point in the desired direction of...someone. Be it the network, the network's parent company, an advertiser, or maybe the writer themselves (though not usually). It's a simple thing to do, really, and people can't wait to be told how they should feel about any given subject, so it helps them out, too!
  For example, I recently read a story about a young woman who was arrested for the deplorable crime of neglecting her three children. She left a very small baby alone and took the other two with her on a drug buy or something. The details escape me now. It doesn't matter. What matters is, the children were all put at extreme risk and she is obviously a very disturbed individual and a shitty mother.
  To me, that's the take-away we should all get from this story. Don't leave babies alone. Don't take toddlers to buy drugs. Maybe don't do drugs at all if you have kids. Don't be a shitty person. Period. That is not how the story was presented. Instead, the writer opened up something like this: This twenty-three year old woman with three kids from three different fathers, none of whom is she married to left her illegitimate...blah, blah, blah. "sources" say she has had at least one abortion...blah, blah, blah...drugs...blah...stripping...blah. Do you see the pattern developing here?
  There is a clear direction the reader is being pointed. We are meant to judge this woman for things that have nothing to do with her crime. We're meant to believe she is much more than a drug addict who neglected her children. We are to conclude she is a slut who has made a bevy of terrible life decisions. Decisions that not only make her a very bad and evil person, but we are made ever more self-righteous for NOT having made similarly bad decisions. We are good people. We are moral people. We are right. We are true. We have God on our side. Buy Pepsi.
  The point is this; we have to consider the source every time we read something, watch something, or listen to someone. All these media outlets have an agenda and it has gotten very far away from simply being an agenda to inform and educate. They have to turn a profit so they have to make a story sexy and interesting. They have to play to our biases and "help" us conform to the standards set forth by some ideal model-consumer. Journalism is fucked and truth is buried so deeply in a story you have to dig through a mile of bullshit to get to it. But don't ever think its not worth it. The truth is always worth digging for.
  That's all for today. Your homework is to read between the lines.

Thisistruth4you@gmail.com