A FB friend posted a link to an article today, the sort of article there are way too many of. I don’t remember what site it came from; half of these sites make me sick and I click on “hide posts from yada yada”. It was about some kid who killed 5 members of his family. But the link was not a tribute to the slain parents, or siblings. It was not a look into what would drive someone to do this.
It was a “how come people pick on guns when knives kill, too” site.
It breaks my heart, all these deaths, because to the public at large, they only matter as a way to serve some agenda. We should be looking into why people are committing these atrocities.
I have my own beliefs that all these meds we dish out, for depression or ADHD or take your pick, have something to do with it, since most of them haven’t been around long enough for us to understand the long-term effects. Or maybe these meds are treating the symptom, but not the actual problem, of mental illness, or they cover the symptoms so well that we miss the smaller cries for help.
But no, we’re fixated on the statistics. Black people died, no one got offended. White people died, and there was rioting. A knife killed five people and no one cares, a gun killed one person and laws changed. Ten people were shot in a mall so we should all be carrying guns. A car wreck kills three, let’s re-examine safety belts.
We’re all missing the point. It’s not about black, white, guns, knives, bombs, gay, straight. Pick a cause, any cause. It’s about us killing each other, and the news and the various interest groups brainwashing us into de-humanizing each other. We’re numbers, we’re colors, we’re political parties, we’re sexual orientation, we’re religious groups.
No. We’re humans, and individuals The Marines at Chattanooga? Thank goodness the media decided to give them faces, and families, and make them human. They deserved it, and so do all these other poor, faceless numbers that everyone throws out there as a statistic.
Because the less we see each other as individual people, the easier the killing and hate becomes.
azbaelus 