Frightening Headlines

[carini]

So with all the lastest with school shooting i am very very freaked out right now. I was ok before, they happened it was horrible. But tonight on the news i found out that it is happening here. Not just here but at the grade school my sister works at. I 1st grade student was expelled for threatening to kill his classmates. Not just a "Oh i could kill you" idle threat but a detialed.. this is how i am gonna kill you cause i hate you threat. I was very very freaked out by this. On top of it when i talked to my sister this kid isn;t in her class but was threatening a kid in her class and the kid told her about the threats first.

it's all getting to close to home now.

 

[Docgtvt]

that is frightening, carini. a local high school here was victim to a threat just this week. seems that a kid who allegedly sexually assaulted a five year old boy last year got tired of the ridicule while out on bail pending trial.





what a wonderful world it would be......and i thought the most frightening headline i ever saw was that george w had been declared president

 

[Ally C]

The fact that the threat was detailed is very worrying. The closer to home it gets the stronger you have to be. Your home should be your haven from the world outside. I'm not suggesting a 'fortress mentality', and I do hope the school get this problem resolved.

 

[carini]

it just weird to see how much the world as changed... i mean i keep catching myself saying.. when i was in school.. and that waan;t that long ago... it;s like something is really really wrong withi this place

 

[kid cash]

kids killing kids. what the hell is this world coming to.

 

[RisiaSkye]

Save the children...blah, blah, blah

a) Kids have been killing kids for quite some time. In earlier years, we just had wars once a generation. That way, we could send the teenage boys off to other places to kill other kids, rather than our own. Nothing like a bunch of seventeen year olds being drafted (and some volunteering) to cure the narcissism of teen alienation. They die or come back so fucked up, they have other problems besides the teenage woes to worry about.

b) Kids games have largely been about death and destruction for ages. "Cowboys & Indians" (my apologies, we were young and didn't know better ) ring a bell with anyone else? "Cops and robbers?" Not only were they about killing and violence, but half the kids played the villains. Not everybody wanted to be the "good guys". Not even back in the good old days.

c) What scares me the most about that headline is that there are only two ways to see it: either some moron has a gun accessible to a six year old (thus making the threat viable--how else can someone that small kill someone else? They don't have strength or knowledge of anatomy to maximize what strength they have), or some other moron mistook someone else's tragedy (Santee) for their own, and overreacted in a typically missing-the-freaking-point way. The media that reported the case of this small child to the public, encouraging hysteria, for example. Hey, doesn't everyone want to be famous? Think this discourages copycats?

d) Has there ever actually been a time when people WEREN'T rallying around the image of the endangered children? If you read historical texts much, you'd think the world has gone to hell in the oft-mentioned handbasket at least a hundred times already. This too shall pass, until the next tragedy comes along. This is hardly new, the technologies of destruction have just gotten more efficient and have proliferated to the point that children can get guns--even though don't really understand them, or the finality of death.

Needless to say, I don't condone violence, and living in So Cal, actually knowing people at Santana High, I feel terrible for those people. But the hyperbolic rhetoric about the children of this country serves no one.

[Edited by RisiaSkye on 03-16-2001 at 03:14 AM]

 

[Ally C]

RisiaSkye

I've stated my opinion in other threads similar to this one that I don't think we've evolved that far. Death is the one certain thing in life, but how we order our lives before that final event is what makes us [or fails to make us] 'human'. There's a marked difference between childhood games which re-enact primal instincts and urges as well as play out actual 'adult' activites, and 'the real thing'. I'm not in disagreement with what you have to say, but I think that your views are expressed in a way which hints at a capitulation to the more depressing aspects of contemporary life. I agree (again, I've said this before, as have others) that the pace of technology appears to have outstripped our ability to try to live harmoniously. I don't think that because it's always been the case that "[k]ids have been killing kids for quite some time" (and the use of child soldiers in some countries nowadays is a poignant example), is any reason for us to feel less worried. Your point about the access to a gun is valid, but I'm more worried about the vehemence expressed by such children in the first place. I don't believe in recourse to an 'it was so better when I was a kid' philosophy, it probably wasn't. I do believe that we are being confronted with an alarming rise in 'frightening headlines', and that if we want to think of ourselves as civilised, as advanced, then we have a lot more work on our hands than we think. 'Kids will be kids', but it's a sad reflection on our world that not all of them will live to be adults.

 

[RisiaSkye]

Ally C

I'm not passively accepting, I'm merely pointing out the obvious. What you say about childhood games and "the real thing" misses the point--if those kids had had guns, would it have stayed a game? The violence expressed by these children is still a child's game--with an adult's weapon.

And I'm not sure that being confronted with more headlines means that anything is substantially different, besides the media reports and the demographics of death. Gang related child death has been on the rise for decades. Children die of AIDS, drugs, abuse, and diseases that were supposedly cured ages ago EVERY DAY in this country. But what do we mourn and mythologize? The day some suburban white kids were affected by it. I find THAT profoundly scary, and more than a little sad.

How fast do things change, really? This is a violent country, founded in violence, maintained by violence, and in love with violence. Our biggest movies are murderously violent action spectacles, the biggest games representations of death, the most popular TV dramas are about death (ER, Law & Order, SVU, etc. etc. etc. Hell, even Survivor is premised on the idea that SOMEONE COULD GET HURT!! Quick, get the camera.) And no, the media doesn't create violence--the violence of this nation pre-exists all of the media people bitch about. Violence is a huge part of who we are, and our cultural productions reflect it. Again, it's nothing new--it's our bread and butter.

 

[Ally C]

I see ...

... I think it would be a timely moment to state that I'm from England [sorry, I updated my profile, but where I'm 'From: ' hasn't appeared yet].

I am in agreement with you by and large, but as you said: "Gang related child death has been on the rise for decades". That's my point too - it's getting worse. I don't subscribe to all that political correctness nonsense, but differentiating between "white kids" and others from less fortunate and / or 'ethnic' communities is an act of positive discrimination. Using your depiction of American society, I think the ONLY way things might ultimately change for the better is through these occurences being brought to our attention, becoming politicised, and engendering a public will for some sort of madate for reform. Things being the way they are, it's no surprise that certain stories gain precedence over others. I don't like this aspect either, but I think it's unlikely to change. Perhaps there's a case for making the best of a bad thing, rather than making the case for lots of bad things and getting nothing done? It doesn't make for enjoyable reading, but it's the hand your 'culture' has dealt you.

 

[RisiaSkye]

Yes, I am discriminating. And I'm doing it to make a point--those other deaths that I mentioned aren't front page news? And why not? THAT's why the whiteness of these kids is important--it doesn't become newsworthy until it happens to suburbanites and/or whites. Only the deaths of middle America seem to be news.

The same day as the Santee shootings, I saw three other violent death reports in the newspaper--buried in the back pages. All of them were hispanic. One was a teenager, who was apparently raped and killed by her stepfather. There's something really suspicious going on here when we take some deaths seriously while others just slip under the radar, and that's the point I was trying to make.

The problem with the argument for politicization is two-fold. First, media representation of the tragedies is commensurate with the public's tastes--everyone wants to boost their sales/ratings/market share, so they try to top each other through the hysteria of their rhetoric and the flashiness and exploitiveness of their coverage. This encourages a fame-obsessed public, particularly alienated teens who don't feel they get enough attention, to copycat, in order to become famous. Second, there is a serious motivation problem. This is part of why the rhetoric so angers me. People all around here cry about the poor children, but try getting those same people to give up their guns, knives, kickboxing classes, and tasers. We love a good tragedy. It gives us another chance to contemplate our navels and lament the "good old days" that never were. That doesn't mean we're willing to change.

Fact: Tragedies aren't new, and they aren't going to go away.

Just because it happens to children doesn't mean it's more tragic, only that it makes us more uncomfortable. We want to believe we all have long healthy lives in front of us. This is a delusion. Children have always died. I don't mean to be callous. I'm very sorry those two people (one of whom, incidentally, was an adult) died in Santee. That sucks. But, hundreds of people died of car accidents on that same day. Let's have a little perspective. There have been a total of, what, a dozen school shooting deaths in the last two years? More than that died of cholera, for fuck's sake--this month alone. (check out the CDC website--http://www.CDC.gov) in the US.

So why all the hyperbole? Why is the President saying this child's name in anger, when he doesn't even know all the names of the people he has personally been responsible for killing? (As Gov, he had final say on execution) That's what I was trying to point out. Yes, children have shot each other. But drag racing deaths among teenagers are way down since the 50's, and people have stopped shooting their Post Office co-workers (the last "outbreak" of public shootings). Tying ourselves up in knots about what a sick world it is misses the point. The world is fine. We're sometimes sick. And those sick people sometimes hurt others. There is emphatically NOTHING new about that.

That handbasket we're all riding in has been moving for a long time--at least if you listen to the news and the people who want to romanticize the world they grew up in. I don't see it reaching hell anytime soon.

 

[Ally C]

I think we are agreeing on most if not all things here, but are picking up each other's 'signals' differently. It's a common problem I've experienced on the BB (and in chat), and it happens all the time 'out there' too.

I took note from the outset your position on highlighting the colour / 'class' of those who make it to the front pages / prime time news. Somewhere along the line you seem to have misinterpreted my position. I know that media representation is unfair, is intrinsically 'wrong'. The news we are given isn't (obviously) 'all' the news there is; and more importantly, it comes packaged in a way which obliterates more 'facts' than it reveals. What I'm saying is what's our next move in the face of this? Your posts display an intellect and passion which suggest that you can make informed decisions without relying wholly on what the media spews out as 'fact'. Why can't others? The facets of the human species [or should that be 'human animal' - or should we just lose the 'human'?] which you describe are true, and, as I keep saying, I can't see them 'going away' either.

It seems to be a case of 'it's not fair' ... which is also true. It seems to be a case of 'people will never change', which is also true - but only to a point. I think it's up to individuals to act and take responsibility. The government, health, law, teaching [etc] organisations aren't the solution. They're just large-scale manifestations of an imagined state of being: the idea that we live in an ordered world, are in control etc. We aren't, only of ourselves, even though all such large organisations and institutions impact on our daily lives. I don't expect them to change things for me. I've stopped voting, have never owned a gun [I wonder if this would be the case if I lived elsewhere?], have never had children, am presently single, and so on. All of these decisions I have made. Also, I don't subscribe to wholesale essentialist notions of the self, and although I've toyed with existentialist reasoning, once I 'wake up' to the world around me I realise that there is NOTHING I can do to change that world. So I live MY life, which just happens to involve reading 'frightening headlines'. Yes, I know full well that there's a hell of a lot not being said. It's probably just as well; I know I could never internalise never mind cope with it all.

The fact I concur with the sentiments expressed by the initiator of this thread is in no way a collusion with the source(s) of the story itself. I refuse to draw any lines either. I'll live within my own parameters, and trust - however misplaced this may be - that others will allow me the liberty to do so.

 

[RisiaSkye]

Ally C

While we seem to have chased others away from this thread, for what it's worth--I really enjoyed discussing this with you.

 

[Ally C]

RisiaSkye

It's worth a lot actually. Did we really chase the others away? Thanks for your contribution to the dialogue. I really value my time here when I come across someone with something to say and the ability to say it well. It's when we lose the ability to 'talk' with one another that the troubles such as those mentioned on this thread begin. I missed your nice reply to me as I wasn't here over the weekend. I'm here now, so again: many thanks.