Saturday, December 22, 2012

Well Danny I gotta be honest with you. I really don't think that it will have much of an impact although it is easy to comprehend and digest. The thing is, there's just way too much money in it and to simply ask the Hollywood elite to stop using weapons in movies (against people anyways) is like asking every crystalmeth addict in the US to stop using.
Even if they did do this, I believe the bigger problem is that these shootings are a symptom of a bigger problem and that is that the mental health support system in the US is virtually non-existent. Healthy family structures are also very rare. Parents do not know how to nurture their children any more. Remember too that discipline is a concern. Traditional Asian sociological standards *encourage* strong or at least medial parental discipline. For Americans and many other parts of the West, the opposite is true. Parents cannot even spank their children, not even really yell at them anymore without raising the spectre of some governmental intervention.
In short, the younger people of today are without an identity, a sense of self here in the US, Canada and other places. It is this crucial developmental step that causes all sorts of mental illness and disorder (imbalance) in the teen-to-twenty-five group.
We have held up the automobile as the greatest asset in our very lives at the expense of all else: Health, a general sense of well-being, a sense of physical independence and reliance, and mental balance. As Charlie Chaplin said in his Great Dictator speech in 1940, "We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in." How true was that in 1940...How true is that even more today, seventy-four years after Chaplin wrote those words on a screenplay.
The Great Battle today is the one that is never covered in the major media, and it is this: The War Against Anonymity. Younger people must feel like they are somebody. If they don't, then they will fail unless they repel this loss later on. When a person's spirit fails, they have nothing left to lose. When they have nothing left to lose, everyone becomes the enemy, and when this stage is reached, nothing but bad things happen, manifested in suicides and unfixable depressions and violence against others.

So, no I believe that our problem is that we have a core structural crisis going on here. These shootings are merely valenced symptoms of the bigger and more ominous problem. Hollywood violence and video games may not help much, but the blame truly lies within us, all of us as a society. Our current way of doing things simply is not working. I do not believe that we can sustain a Nation with such a high overhead of broken, anonymous and mentally sick persons. The answer is beyond me. I really do not know. It may take several generations to rebuild a structure that has one tenth the sociopathic tendencies that America currently experiences today. In the same way that we built America up helping others and raising the lesser privileged, we will as well tear it down in future by doing the exact opposite: Running the weak into the ground, promoting anonymity by sacrificing the individual importance, even on the family level.
We have become a Nation of violent shut-ins, clowns, posers and pseudo-badasses. Everybody tries so very hard to be a somebody but in doing so they remain a nobody. they sacrifice what is important and turn in their true selves for a cartoon version of who they are. It is an impossible situation that Hollywood certainly cannot fix.
Most people here posture themselves as tough and rugged, while simultaneously (and secretly) they are scared to death. A large SUV makes you tougher, but only because you are really scared to drive to begin with. Bulking up at the gym makes you look more fit, but you go there because you are afraid to do any real exercise outside. Many claim that they are Free, while simultaneously they are dependent on prescription and illegal drugs, on alcohol, on sex, on movies, on religion (yes you can be addicted to religion for religion's sake) and a host of other pathologies and demons too numerous to face.
Taiwan has these problems too, but they are much smaller in volume. How do they raise their children? Do their children expect to have everything handed to them as soon as they get out of college? Can their children do their own laundry even at 26? Because a lot of them cannot here.
Maybe that is the path. I am not sure. I wish I had a better answer for you Danny

-Stephan

 


 



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