Florida Pilot

When I was 15, there was no internet, no cable TV, no satellite TV, terrestrial TV with its self censorship kept some sort of perspective I think. Now kids of 15 have access to information and propaganda that we couldn't get our hands on at 15...its a different world Phantom.

When we were kids, we would want to play the white hats, the good guys who win at the end. Today, kids want to be the gangstas...

Another reason I think are parents. When I was 15, my mom didn't work (well she did but not full time) so she was around to keep an eye on me. Today both parents work and kids aren't just under their parents' eye anymore and many parents just don't have a clue how their kids entertain themselves and well the internet is just beyond some of them.

Well, according to the tests, when I was 15 I already had the mental development of a 28-year-old... ;)

But seriously, I think it's a lot of factors. The total breakdown of self-discipline and enforced discipline has a lot to do with it, as does the breakup of the family, the need for a two-working-parent home (I blame on high taxes), and the general sorry state of good instruction in critical thinking.

It's also the "Culture of Victimization" phenomenon:

People are unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions and mistakes... "I'm a victim! I'm being oppressed!" (Which is also a major factor in our overlitigous society, which is also a major factor in the high cost of insurance, etc., etc...)

BUT They're perfectly willing to believe (and others are perfectly willing to teach them) that they and their ancestors are/were 'evil oppressors' who have victimized everybody else.

Institutionalized self-loathing.

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Originally posted by Phantom
...I mean what is going on, when I was in school all you had to worry about was being roughed up by the local bully, then it was knives...Now its being sprayed by some nut with an UZi. Where did things go so out of control?

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Don't know about that. There were school shootings when I was 12 or so (I'm 30 now). Remember "I don't like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats? Supposedly based on a true story...

When my mother was in her twenties (i.e. pre-Dan) back in the 60's, she taught school in inner-city Brooklyn. She taught 2nd grade kids who often had knives with them in school. Their older brothers (11-12 years old in some cases) had graduated to guns. She's told me that these shootings are sadly not new, but the massacre-like aspect and the fact that they've happened in middle-class and affluent suburbs is.

Well my father grew up in Toronto and Ottawa in the '40s and all he had worry about was someone starting a scrap, and it was was decided by fists. He didn't run into knives or guns.

I realize the shooting are not new. Someone brings Dad's gun to school to show off and someone gets shot, someone is bullied he shoots the guy who bullied him, but these massacres...These are new.

Break up of families has, IMO, little to do with it. Not saying it isn't a factor, but discipline is a larger part of it. Parents can't discipline their children properly these days. If you do someone calls the cops.

Responsibility is another factor...The responsiblity of parents and teachers to recognize what is going on with their charges. Don't say they can't, they sure did when I was in highschool, and that was just 10 years ago.

When I was fifteen (18 years ago) I was beaten bloody with a baseball bat. My senior year I had knee surgery to repair my MCL because of the damage caused.

If I wasn't such a nice guy, I would have made a nice batch of home brewed explosives and wrecked the school, or gotten one of Dad's innumerable weapons and gone "Hunting".

Fortunately, I had another outlet for my violent tendancies, Role Playing Games. I killed a whole lot of Soviet Spies the next Top Secret game, IIRC.

I also had a firm grounding in Personal Responsibility.

So, the violence has always existed. Alienation has always existed. And doing awful things to get attention has always existed.

Unfortunately, our society has grown more jaded, and while in the old days, having long or punk hair, playing loud music, etc were enough to get that attention, that certainly isn't the case now.

I dressed in black, and got my hair cut like Billy Idol, I got the attention I needed.

Now, people dress like that every day. It's harder to get that attention, so if you want that attention, you have to do something much bigger to get it.

Shoot a school. Blow up a building with an airplane.

It's a very wack version of the old "Adolescent Cry for Help."

That doesn't make it right, of cource. There should be other ways to get the help. But, when you're 15, everything is the most important, most emotional, most everything that's ever happened, and nobody has ever had it that bad before.

Alex