Pointing Your Fingers Without Looking

If there is any certainty in the world, is that someone has to have the finger of blame put on them for someone else's mess. After viewing several hours of news coverage on the recent Virginia Tech shootings, it seems those fingers are starting to wave towards a few candidates: the campus security, for not being able to stop the mad student within the two hours it took to claim 33 lives; the staff, for not noticing the serious mental issues; and the not-so-strict gun laws in Virginia that allowed him to buy the guns used in this horrifying massacre.

Being old enough to remember, I can recall the early finger-pointing of the Columbine High School shooting from 1999:

"It has to be the music that drove those kids to do this."

"It must have been the movies they watched."

"It must have been the video games they were playing."

And throughout all of this, everyone forgot they were teenagers, living under their parent's roof. The roof of their parents, who seemingly did not know those two kids were planning something like this for a long time. They went to high school to learn. The high school that seemed to ignore the warning signs of these two going off. Only after they did what they did were people willing to pay attention. The problem is, a lot of us in soceity looked in the wrong place for our answers to this tragedy.

The truth of Columbine and of the Virginia Tech shootings is simply this: if you're looking for blame, all you need to do is look in the mirror.

Did we as a society want something like this to happen? Of course not. But we did let it happen. We allowed ourselves to lose sight of an obvious problem in order to sleep well at night. Of course nothing's wrong, because if it was, we would have to deal with it. Why can't someone deal with the powder kegs walking among us instead of me? Problems require responsibility on all sides of the coin. Just because the unstable are about to snap doesn't mean we should ignore them so they can play out their insane fantasies of revenge with us as the bad guys waiting to be pumped full of lead.

But if we did stop to examine this problem with the unstable people among us, what do you think that would say about us as people? We want to believe we care for others, that we have compassion for those less fortunate. But that is not a view shared by everyone. We scrape up as much as we can while we can, because we have no clue how long we will be around to enjoy it. There's no time to worry about everyone else when you gotta get yours. When something like this happens, there has to be that moment where you are reminded that you are human, you are part of a society, and as part of a society, you screwed up. It's not the music, the movies, the internet that drove the boys of Columbine and the student at Virginia Tech to shoot their fellow classmates: we did that by what we did or didn't do to them.

We didn't talk to them at that crucial moment before they started to think their distorted plans for revenge. We didn't say what they were thinking was wrong. We didn't stop bullying them in class. We didn't stop looking them down. We didn't pay attention to what was going on. We didn't step in hard enough. We didn't see. We didn't want to see. We didn't want to see for fear of what we would see about ourselves.

We did let them run free to think their twisted thoughts. We did want to believe that everything would be okay, even though we avoided confronting the horrible truth. We did want to do the right thing, but were afraid to do so. We did want to help, but were unsure as to how. We did want to do soemthing, but just did not care. Now, we have to point our fingers at something else in order to relieve ourselves of the burden of failing to do the right thing. After all, if we didn't blame something else for a tragedy like this, who would we have left to blame but ourselves as a people? We can't blame the killers for just going crazy, because then we would need to know why they went crazy. We would have to hear the stories of bullying, of pressure, of rejection, of dislocation, of abuse, and realize we are not too far away from being as mad as them. How can we live with that when it would be so much easier to blame someone else and shift our anger, our confusion, our regret onto one thing and hope its punished and rids us of all our angst?

Scapegoating seems to be commonplace in many areas of society. "I don't want to look stupid, so I'll make someone else look stupid." You can't scapegoat something like Virginia Tech or like Columbine. You can't point the finger at an extraneous influence and hope that the pain and agony of regret disappears with it. If you do, you already dishonored and pushed aside the memory of those lost in these tragedies. They deserve better, just like those mentally ill boys did. You need to remember. You must not forget. You need to see the world that's in front of your face, but never really pay attention to. And just as important, you need to give a damn about someone other than yourself. So stop pointing your fingers and do something important to improve your society, or better yet, make yourself better. This kind of loss should not be in vain.

The following was the view and opinion of the author and does not reflect the views and opinions of the host of this blog. And if you can’t figure it out yet, wake up, people. Wake the f**k up.

Truths that Cannot be Accepted

As a people, we all create a sembelance of how things are and the way life should be. Individually, we create our own truths. These are truths that are often based in paranoia and outright stupidity. In order to help clear up the truth and the lies, here's a list of truths that some of us refuse to accept:

--Muslim extremists, not the government, were responsible for 9/11:
Sorry Charlie Sheen, but it is true. And as for you Rosie O'Donnell, may I recommend spending a lot more time hanging upside down in that "vampire bat machine" thing you got. I always like how these wackos suggest Bush had enough of a brain to set the biggest terrorist attack in our nation's history in motion, but can't explain why he couldn't find WMDs in Iraq. Bush is not a master criminal like Kaiser Soze. He's more like the Foghorn Leghorn of master criminals. Speaking of WMDs...

--There are no WMDs in Iraq:
Donald Rumsfeld, I envy you. Even after such insurmountable evidence to the contrary, you still say there were WMDs there. I don't envy you for your ignorance. I envy you because unlike other people, you didn't lose your job and get shipped off to the old folks home for your assertions.

--If your twelve year old wears more makeup than an old lady on Beverly Hills, she better be a
ho:
I believe some kids need makeup to look good. But here's the thing: this applies to ugly kids. And besides, your makeup says volumes about who you are. Goth kids who wear black eyeliner, lipstick, and pasty face makeup tend to be a morose and depressed bunch. Kids who wear heavy amounts of blush and eyeliner might be mistaken for hooker working the street. Sure its to impress the guys in school, but you know who else it impresses? Child molesters.

--Having a kid at thirteen is not "fun":
Your first love is not the end-all, be-all of your love life. Give yourself some time. You have plenty of opportunities to be disappointed. In the meantime, buy a dog or cat. You can actually ignore them and not feed them that much if you're busy. Plus, child neglect is a crime.

--O.J. did kill someone:
That fiasco over his book that explained how he would have killed two innocent people might have netted him some cash, except for one thing: it's not a hypothetical he killed them. It's a fact. Deal with it, naysayers.

The following was the view and opinion of the author and does not reflect the views and opinions of the host of this blog. And if you want the truth, trust me, you can't handle the truth.

Life During Wartime, Part 1

War is not something anyone in their right minds should want. Sometimes it is inevitable and must be done to protect those we love and those who can't fight alone. But war is the last option, and should not be the first one on the list of solutions. The war in Iraq is something I never had a heavy opposition to, but that it wasn't finished a decade earlier was irritating to say the least. It was interesting to hear the senior Bush some years before his son cleaned up the mess and long before 9/11 suggest the reason he wanted to halt the advance back in 1991 was the fear this would turn into my generation's Vietnam. Now it seems like its closer to this generation's Vietnam.

I never disagreed with going to war against Iraq or Afghanistan, but what I've been upset by is the obvious lack of planning and ineptness our administration has had. When I heard optimistic reports early on that we would be able to establish a democratic structure in a matter of months, I knew that wasn't going to be the case. I knew when our leaders said they found weapons of mass destruction and forged their whole reason for the invasion on it, there was that little piece of me that knew what would happen if this blew up in their face. Now, I expect the government to not tell me EVERYTHING under the sun, but the lies aren't holding up for me to just look away and ignore them.

This is not the incident that will tarnish this administration in my humble opinion. What will tarnish Bush's term as president is the handling of things at home, especially during Hurricane Katrina. Living at the southern end of the U.S. and hearing horror stories of what- happened tore me up. But then watching news footage and hearing the many interviews about it then and now enraged me. When our government has a faster reaction to a foreign war than to the worst natural disaster to come our way in many decades, there is a real problem. Accountability and responsibility on many levels was absent, but even worse was our government's response. I don't care about political affiliations here, but about common f**kin' sense. When your leaders appear to not have any, it doesn't speak well for your country.

I have to say that unlike Vietnam, the response to our soldiers on the ground has been generally positive. Maybe because we have learned from the mistakes we made. Our soldiers are people who are put into impossible situations and deal with unbelievable stress every day. Many of the souls sent into Vietnam managed to survive with their bodies, but often not with their minds. If anything has really been learned from our time in Iraq is that its okay to disagree with the leaders, but not with the soldiers in turn. They may be fighting in a war that many don't agree with, but that does not mean they should not be shown respect. They don't ask for pity, but they damn well deserve the respect.

To be continued...

The following was the view and opinion of the author and does not reflect the views or opinions of the host of this blog. And if you can’t figure it out yet, this particular post is the first of many. You were warned in advance.