Fanning the flames

     How would you feel if you called 911 about a house on fire and instead of fire truck showing up the city sent a gasoline truck loaded with gas and they started to squirt more fuel onto the fire.  Unless your Mayor's name was "Nero" and your city was Rome, you would definitely think something was terribly, TERRIBLY WRONG!   

     I contend that all of this attention to the families on Newtown  are only going to increase the amount of this kind of gun violence.  After all, with our 24/7 cable news, the killers name (which I will not mention here) has been mentioned over and over again.  His school pictures are put up on the screen 10 times every minute.   We are bombarded with interviews from doctors, relatives and friends who claim to have known him and offer twisted forms of sympathy for him and his troubled mind.

     To me this will only foster MORE of this kind of violence.  How many mentally disturbed individuals are out there this very minute watching with glee the post-humus attention the killer is receiving from news media, hollywood stars, pro athletes, politicians ... and yes, even the President of the United States.  These individuals don't care if it's negative press that the killer is getting, for to them ANY ATTENTION is better than NO ATTENTION.   We must understand that the mentally ill, like this killer, do not see things the same way as you and I do.  When they see the President eulogizing the teachers, and children of the school, they see him as eulogizing the killer and giving credence to what he did.  It's a warped and twisted world that many of these people live in.  We may mean good, but they don't see it that way.

    Therefore all this attention (I am sorry to say) is only fanning the flames and at this very moment producing the next mass-killer, all the while we think we are trying to eliminate them from our society.

     Frankly, I am tired of all this attention.  Yes, what happened was tragic.  These parents dropped their children off at the most safest place on earth they could only to find it was not so.  But at the same time, over a 100 people died yesterday on automobile accidents and many of those people were children.  But these people are unmentioned.  The President won't be coming to their funerals, or give speeches from the White House.  No one will put their name on a helmet  or a jersey.  No one will be calling for the end of automobile accidents or the end of the automobile.  No congressional bills will have their names of them or their town inscribed on it.    

    We have replaced real sympathy with virtual-sympathy.  Through the internet we can offer sympathy by writing long sermons or poems on our Facebook wall and pass it on to our friends, thinking somehow we have enlightened the rest of the world and that our virtual-tears and virtual-sobs will virtually change the world.  All the while our neighbor next door has lost a father, a mother, a sibling or is dealing with depression, cancer or both.  For after all, those problems require too much of us.  (Don't they have doctors for that?)  Maybe that next door neighbor has a troubled son who needs help but she doesn't know where to turn?  Maybe he's depressed or lonely and has no father-figure to help him?  (Isn't there an after school program for kids like this?  What am I paying taxes for anyway!)  Instead, we like helping people over the internet because those people are not going to show up on our door step at 3am looking for help.   We can keep them at a virtual-distance from us where they can't touch us and yet we can fool ourselves into thinking somehow we are touching them.

    So, go ahead and write on your Facebook walls.  Send e-mails and e-cards to the school.  Hash-tag them on twitter.  "Friend" some of the survivors and first responders and tell them you will "pray" for them, but know in your heart that you never will because you are too busy reading the next juicy piece of news they have on the Newtown-killer.   Write another touching poem about the massacre and how they will all be missed.

    Who knows?  Maybe the next killer-in-the-making will read your diatribe and in their own warped and twisted mind be emboldened to be even MORE infamous (not famous) than the Newtown-killer.  You, however, will be lulled into the mistaken idea that this won't happen again because we will prevent killers like this from gaining access to these weapons of mass destruction.  But of course...

• Timothy McVeigh didn't need an assault weapon to murder his victims in Oklahoma. All he needed was a few hundred pounds of cheap fertilizer and a U-haul truck.  
• The Una-bomber didn't need an AR-15 to kill his victims.  All he needed was the US Post-office to deliver his boxes of death.  
• The largest US school massacre occurred in 1927 in Bath Michigan by a frustrated school board member who killed 45 children with 3 bombs placed in the school.

   But then again, who needs facts in an age of feeling.