"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God." Matthew 5:9
It's a little before 2 a.m. I am sitting on my couch with my roommate Dennis, watching t.v., when a preview for a movie called "Elephant" comes on the screen. It appears to be about a school shooting, and we are both interested enough to stay up to watch it.
An hour and 11 minutes later, I am left speechless. The first 50 minutes of the movie were tedious, slow-paced and methodical. But the rip-roaring final 20 minutes were as gruesome, maniacal and ruthless as I can ever imagine. The pure, unalterated hatred that was pouring from the screen left the viewed with this feeling of numbness, as if what was transpiring was an isolated, distant event that could never happen in real life, much less in a town like his or her own.
But that's exactly what the people in towns like Littletown, Colorado thought until that fateful fall day at Columbine High School.
I remember being in middle school when the school shootings at Columbine occured. I don't, however, recollect any immediate effects on my life. But, in retrospect, I can see the world change in response to these heinous actions by these heinous teens.
But the question I asked myself when all of this happened, the question I asked myself while watching the events unfold in the movie, and the question I am asking myself at this time is this: "How did it get this far?" What happened in the lives of these teenagers--indeed, in the lives of anybody who cold-bloodedly murders another person-- to cause them to react in such an evil way? Was it a dysfunctional family life? Were they picked on by their peers? Was there something biologically-wrong with them? Was it a combination of these factors, or something I didn't even think of?
I grew up in a loving house, but I did endure a 3 to 4 year period of intense familial tension that took a major toll on me personally, spiritually and physically. During this time, I began to notice that I had a real problem with repressing my anger for a period of time, only to release it on a helpless-person who happened to annoy me on a given day. And, when I was a young boy, I was picked on for being small and docile, but that ended as soon as I hit my growth-spurt and was big enough to make people second-guess whether they wanted to test me. So, of the aforementioned-factors I can identify, I've had some experience with each of them. Yet, I cannot imagine myself being in a position where I truly thought of picking up a gun, loading it up ammo, entering into my school or workplace, and picking-off people around me. It just simply does not register for me.
I do know one thing: something has to change, be it our culture, our gun-control laws, the way we deal with children who display anger tendencies, or just the way we look at teenagers in general. The violence that our culture venerates is sad and begets more and more violence. A person can flip on the television, and see images of brutality and decadence scroll by without the slightest remorse or revultion. The demented, desensitized way that the characters in this movie went about their killings disturbed me. It was as if they were merely playing a video game.
And maybe that is the problem. Maybe our "reality"-obsessed culture has become desensitized to the horrors of "real" life. Maybe, with games like "Grand Theft Auto," "James Bond," and an endless-string of war-themed games, our minds have become so dulled and dilluted with images of horrifying violence and malice that the sight of a human being killing another human being is common place and barely noteworthy.
You may be thinking, "Well, is this supposed to be a political rant? A spiritual reflection? A personal testimony? Or just the ramblings of a 19-year old at 3:35 in the morning?" And I don't the answer. But what I can say is this: we need a rival of morality. We need to get back to the days when violence against humanity--whether it was against a "fetus" or a "person"-- was viewed as immoral and unacceptable. We need to get back to the days when the wishy-washy, noncommital rhetoric of a bunch of talking heads was viewed as just that: unimportant words by unimportant people. I think the biggest injustice in the last 5-10 years was the development of the attitude that we cannot impose our idea of right and wrong on others. Well pardon my bluntness, but to hell with that! That is what the essense of democracy is: voting on what you feel is right. If we cannot stand up and speak our mind and our beliefs, than we've lost sight of what our country was built on. And if we can't strive to make our town, our state, our country, our world a better, safer, more moral place, than we're left with only one option: we can sit back, turn on the news, and watch as a generation of disenfranchised-youth mow each other down with AK-47s, shotguns and glocks.
It's a little before 2 a.m. I am sitting on my couch with my roommate Dennis, watching t.v., when a preview for a movie called "Elephant" comes on the screen. It appears to be about a school shooting, and we are both interested enough to stay up to watch it.
An hour and 11 minutes later, I am left speechless. The first 50 minutes of the movie were tedious, slow-paced and methodical. But the rip-roaring final 20 minutes were as gruesome, maniacal and ruthless as I can ever imagine. The pure, unalterated hatred that was pouring from the screen left the viewed with this feeling of numbness, as if what was transpiring was an isolated, distant event that could never happen in real life, much less in a town like his or her own.
But that's exactly what the people in towns like Littletown, Colorado thought until that fateful fall day at Columbine High School.
I remember being in middle school when the school shootings at Columbine occured. I don't, however, recollect any immediate effects on my life. But, in retrospect, I can see the world change in response to these heinous actions by these heinous teens.
But the question I asked myself when all of this happened, the question I asked myself while watching the events unfold in the movie, and the question I am asking myself at this time is this: "How did it get this far?" What happened in the lives of these teenagers--indeed, in the lives of anybody who cold-bloodedly murders another person-- to cause them to react in such an evil way? Was it a dysfunctional family life? Were they picked on by their peers? Was there something biologically-wrong with them? Was it a combination of these factors, or something I didn't even think of?
I grew up in a loving house, but I did endure a 3 to 4 year period of intense familial tension that took a major toll on me personally, spiritually and physically. During this time, I began to notice that I had a real problem with repressing my anger for a period of time, only to release it on a helpless-person who happened to annoy me on a given day. And, when I was a young boy, I was picked on for being small and docile, but that ended as soon as I hit my growth-spurt and was big enough to make people second-guess whether they wanted to test me. So, of the aforementioned-factors I can identify, I've had some experience with each of them. Yet, I cannot imagine myself being in a position where I truly thought of picking up a gun, loading it up ammo, entering into my school or workplace, and picking-off people around me. It just simply does not register for me.
I do know one thing: something has to change, be it our culture, our gun-control laws, the way we deal with children who display anger tendencies, or just the way we look at teenagers in general. The violence that our culture venerates is sad and begets more and more violence. A person can flip on the television, and see images of brutality and decadence scroll by without the slightest remorse or revultion. The demented, desensitized way that the characters in this movie went about their killings disturbed me. It was as if they were merely playing a video game.
And maybe that is the problem. Maybe our "reality"-obsessed culture has become desensitized to the horrors of "real" life. Maybe, with games like "Grand Theft Auto," "James Bond," and an endless-string of war-themed games, our minds have become so dulled and dilluted with images of horrifying violence and malice that the sight of a human being killing another human being is common place and barely noteworthy.
You may be thinking, "Well, is this supposed to be a political rant? A spiritual reflection? A personal testimony? Or just the ramblings of a 19-year old at 3:35 in the morning?" And I don't the answer. But what I can say is this: we need a rival of morality. We need to get back to the days when violence against humanity--whether it was against a "fetus" or a "person"-- was viewed as immoral and unacceptable. We need to get back to the days when the wishy-washy, noncommital rhetoric of a bunch of talking heads was viewed as just that: unimportant words by unimportant people. I think the biggest injustice in the last 5-10 years was the development of the attitude that we cannot impose our idea of right and wrong on others. Well pardon my bluntness, but to hell with that! That is what the essense of democracy is: voting on what you feel is right. If we cannot stand up and speak our mind and our beliefs, than we've lost sight of what our country was built on. And if we can't strive to make our town, our state, our country, our world a better, safer, more moral place, than we're left with only one option: we can sit back, turn on the news, and watch as a generation of disenfranchised-youth mow each other down with AK-47s, shotguns and glocks.
posted by Kujo @ 3:49 AM
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