what is the matter with people?

I ask that every time I hear of or witness some act of meanness or stupidity or thoughtlessness or selfishness or senseless violence or cruelty, well, the list just goes on, doesn’t it?  I don’t mean the minor daily little jealousies we indulge in. The latest thing that caused those words to spill from my lips is the three episodes of mass murder in three days.  Some guy goes nuts and guns down everyone in sight.  Three guys in three days.  The news media is all atwitter wondering what could have caused this.  Do you think it’s the economy, do you think he was desperate? He had just lost his job/his house/his wife (pick one or more), could that have been it?

They are asking the wrong questions, as if what made them snap explains their actions.  They should be asking, what would bring a person to do THAT, to walk into a room, armed to the teeth, and just start killing people. Desperation seems an awfully shallow excuse.  What is wrong with people, that they have the ability to do something like that.   Where in themselves do they find that?  Is that what being at the top of the food chain means, that we must, by our position, be our own predator?  Even so, I cannot ever imagine that being something I would do for any reason, no matter how many guns I had at my disposal, short of saving my life or the lives of my loved ones.  And even that is a stretch. 

I have always felt that things were not worse than they were when I was growing up, that kids were less safe.  There was not more child abuse, there was not more adultery, there was not more pedophilia, there were not more serial killers, or kidnappings or any of the things that parents use as an excuse to keep their children in sight.  The ratios were probably about the same, it was just that no one talked about it then and now, due to the technology, you hear of every instance.  I roamed the woods at will and, in my time, all us kids basically left the house in the morning and got home in time for dinner.  

I’m having to give up that notion.  This new thing of mass murder, having a stranger walk in and just start blowing people away, that’s definitely different.  I think what they need to be trying to figure out is not what set this guy off, but why he reacted the way he did once he was set off.  And if this one thing is different, there has to have been an avalanche of change .  You just don’t get from then to now in one step.