This Thing Called "Life:" People Just Keep Killing Each Other...
Sometimes it can be really difficult to stay motivated and "on track."
I had some notion that today would be a fairly "busy and productive" sort of day, but the school shooting in Uvalde, TX somehow sent those plans sideways.
In a "former" life, I lived not so far from Uvalde. Pause for thought.
By the latest count, 21 people are dead, 19 of them kids. What did they "do?" Nothing, aside from show up to class...
What I find more sobering is that today's shooting was already the 213th mass shooting in the US, in 2022 alone, this according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks statistics on this sort of thing.
Those are simply reported numbers, not some political of philosophical opinion.
Truth is, I don't really care that much about the whole "gun rights" vs. "gun control" debate. That seems to be a "hot button" topic that never really seems to resolve much.
I'm more interested in looking at the underlying mindset that treats the sanctity of life lightly enough that so many people end up dead, all the time.
I don't care whether "guns kill people" or "PEOPLE kill people;" I want to understand why the broader concept of "killing people" for whatever reason is so different in the USA, than in any of the 11 other countries in which I have lived.
I remember being at someone's BBQ party on a Sunday in the early 1980's in Texas, just a few years after arriving in the US from Europe. I was maybe a junior in college, at the time. A handful of guys were standing around the grill, talking about fancy car stereos and one guy openly admitted that if he saw someone trying to break into his truck to steal his $2,000 sound system, he'd have no problem "shooting the guy."
This wasn't some deranged "gun nut," just a regular late 20's man with a college education, working in the nascent high tech field.
What surprised me wasn't the eternal presence of guns but the subtext that here was someone who seemed like a quite reasonable person who sincerely seemed to think that taking someone's life over a car stereo was a perfectly appropriate response.
In situations like this school shooting, and the numerous and varied mass shootings (and other forms of killings, including driving a vehicle into a group of people) in the US every year, people like to play the mental health card a lot... and I have no doubt that mental health plays an important role here.
But "insanity," or not... let us not overlook the fact that such "insanity" is essentially superimposed onto an underlying tapestry of not only "violent response is acceptable," but also a broader value system that — at least from where I am sitting — seems to value property higher than human life. In other words... "THINGS are more important than PEOPLE."
Maybe that's a harsh indictment, but I have to back off to the 50,000-foot overview and look at our broader culture, here in the US. People bust their butts to make money — which is perfectly acceptable — for the most part not so they can help PEOPLE, but so they can buy more THINGS.
And not saying that applies to everybody, but to enough that it creates a foundational value system... that's maybe a bit sketchy.
I'm not going to dive down this particular rabbit hole much further... time for me to get back to some semblance of my "creative day."
Just needed to put some thoughts down, and put them "out there."
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 20220524 20:44 PDT
0582/1828