[snip description of the sad and sorry state of the U.S.]: My questions as usual will be:
: 1) What "normal" state of affairs is there for these kids to "go back to"? Can an environment that inspires and allows 6 year olds to shoot each other with handguns accurately be called "normal"? Well, yes.....if your brain is a pea rolling down an eight lane highway.
"normal," insofar as that is exactly what the kids are used to; emotional and physical violence, psychosis, and a social and political system that doesn't give a damn. The boomers were a generation with buying power, they still are. Their younger sibs and their children are a smaller generation, numerically, and in a lot of ways, that's hurting them. They have no political clout because the boomers out-vote them. They have no finacial clout because the boomers out-spend them. That's not likely to change, because the boomers aren't retiring until much later than their parents' generation did.
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: 2) How could ANY parent be OK with putting their kid back into that school much less be in a big hurry to do so? This has been boggling my mind ever since these shootings started being publicized three years ago. Shouldn't the first priority toward a child be to protect it from getting killed? Doesn't that supercede all other considerations? It horrifies me to no end that so many parents, especially upper middle class parents like Littleton's that can easily afford safe alternatives, become desperate with anticipation to put their children back into deadly environments.
It's free day-care, really. If U.S. schools were designed to teach kids anything, I wouldn't be confronted, daily, with university students that are incapable of constructing a sentance. I regularly receive papers with sentances that lack verbs and have punctuation spewed, randomly, across the page like sprinkles on a cupcake. No, U.S. elementary schools are designed simply to keep the little rug-rats off the streets for a few hours, so mommy and daddy can go to their meaningless and soul-sapping jobs. High-schools, on teh other hand, are designed in part to train the next generation of mindless drones, but also, for those deemed "untrainable," to keep them under surveilance until they are old enough to be tried as adults.
: What can be said for this except that this is just how barbaric and hopeless western civilization has become. When six year olds are murding six year olds and all anybody wants to do is pretend like nothing is happening,
Of course! See, if we pretend it's a complete abberation and just try to "get back to to normal," then we can ignore the social forces that are driving the problem to begin with. MDG posted some background on the kid. The question isn't "why did this kid kill another kid?" Instead, the question should be why was this kid (or his mother, or anyone) forced to live in those conditions? Why is crack so popular? Why is the drug-war continuing to devour billions of dollars without producing any results? Why do we have enough money for the B-1 bomber, but can't afford to house and feed our kids? Why can NYPD cops shoot an unarmed man 41 times and get away with it? Why, given the police power to execute with impunity, should we expect anything different from civilians? Why did the U.S. kill, either directly, or indirectly, over 400,000 Iraqi civilians? (Not military targets, but unarmed women and children in residential areas.) Given that we can do this, and given that cheap handguns are easily accessible, why should we be at all surprised when our sugar-fed, television-indoctrinated, undereducated children act out on the impulses that we constantly tell them are traditional American values?
:I say its all over my friends. At least I'm praying for it to be now that we've reached this level. How humiliating. How disgraceful.
: Oh yeah, then they're talking about whether or not to prosecute the six-year-old. What are they gonna do, put a six-year-old boy in state pen for life?! Oh yeah, that's fair. Is there no end to the stupidity? Jesus Christ, I give up folks. We have really lost it.
I certainly hope you're right, that it's all over. We've amused ourselves to death. Thank you McDisNikerosoft, for providing us with enough disinfotainment to keep our feeble, atrophied little brains occupied while you strip-mined everything of value. Thank you, extremist religious cults for convincing us all that we're useless pieces of garbage that have no value unless we listen to your particular favorite preacher and do as he says. Thank you, federal government Republi-Crats, for telling us that schools, housing, food, medical care, and equality for all Americans are less important than bombs and bombers, tax cuts for the wealthy, and eliminating barriers to international corporate profittering.
And thank YOU, DDN, for pushing my cynicism button one last time. I think I'm going to go get me a chunk of raw, red meat, some baby seal furs, a bunch of sugared breakfast cereal, and a TV, and climb to the top of a microwave cel-phone relay tower with a high-powered rifle and a hunting scope, and start picking off the ants, one by one, until they come and shoot me down like King Kong. Why the hell not? At least I'd get my 15 minutes of fame...
-Floyd
(No, I wouldn't really do that. I'm just ranting.)
