Scary World

I managed to find a moment this morning to look at the local news. I'm almost always sorry that I do. The media is merely a showcase for horror stories that have already come to pass, and a crystal ball from which we can hypothesize the inconcievable things that may be to come. It is all about death, and fighting, and abuse, and war, and financial decay... The few positive highlights are about inconsequential trivialities - new movies, and celebrity babies, usually. A few of the headlines from Oregon that made an impression on me today were about a mother who stole thousands of dollars from her child's school booster club - and a gunmen shooting 9 people outside of a club last night. These stories are both true tragedies, but they will be twisted and contorted with blame placed on anything other than the individuals. The mother won't be to blame, it will be the fault of the economy. From what I can tell of our nation today, people will blame capitalism, it was the evil corporations who probably discriminate against this poor woman, thus leaving her jobless and desperate, and forcing her to turn to theft to live the life that she deserves. BULLSHIT. The gunmen will not be the root cause of the shooting - it will be the evil gun itself. If the guy wasn't able to own a gun, those people would still be alive. BULLSHIT. The mother was a coward who didn't have the gumption or the drive to figure out legal means to improve her standard of living. The gunmen could have pulled off the same feat with a slingshot. Truth be told, if someone else in the parking lot had been carrying a firearm, they could have taken this creepo out before he was able to hurt so many people. HE was accountable - HE was responsible. Nothing else. I think there is too much emphasis on people deserving better. I think that our president is going to foster this idea of our "rights" as opposed to our "priviliges". No one is held accountable anymore, popular belief seems to be that controlling everyone's environment will save us all. Scary. I hope that there are enough reasonable people left in this nation to teach their children to be responsible for their own actions, to remember the American Dream, and to work towards earning every benefit that this nation has to offer. If I can do nothing else about the state of our world today, I can do that. And I pray that other parents will do the same.