Slaughter Of The Innocent

In the space of five days, Canada and the United States each  experienced terrible mass shootings rampages of senseless violence that are virtually impossible to comprehend.

In Toronto, Canada twenty-one people, including a three-month old baby, were shot at a barbeque in an inner-city neighbourhood. Two people were killed. In 1989, Marc Lepine entered École Polytechnique in Montreal and shot twenty-four people, killing fourteen women.

Yesterday, seventy-one people were shot in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado; twelve were killed and memories of Columbine and Virginia Tech rush back with all their weight of needless death and horror.

These are moments that go beyond mere tragedy. They are horrific events that tear the hearts out of survivors and the families of those who were wounded or killed. Nobody touched by these moments of callous violence will ever be the same again nor will our societies.

The callous and wanton bloodshed is not restricted to North America.  Anders Behring Breivik went on a rampage in Norway shooting eighty-four people, most of them adolescents and teenagers. Like too many who have gone before him, he was lost in a delusion that allowed him to justify killing others.

There have been shootings in virtually any place people gather in public and we have not come close to understanding why it happens or how to protect ourselves from it happening in the future.

There is no protection from the lone gunman who emerges from their dark fantasy to attack innocent lives. It is unpredictable violence that has seen people killed in restaurants, schools and universities, shopping malls, summer camp, on our streets and now in a movie theatre. 

Not all shootings are the work of someone lost in a deranged fantasy. Some are gang related and result from disputes over turf and drugs. Others are the result of school bullying that has escalated to a deadly level and some are not random at all but are the result of criminals settling scores.

We blame it on guns, on video games and violent movies. We blame it on poverty, government and on criminals. We blame it on everyone and everything but ourselves and what we are doing to our societies.

I have no answers or solutions to all of this but one thing is clear to me. As disparate as these different shootings appear to be, they all bear one thing in common. The shooters are clearly detached from the mainstream society as the rest of us define it. They are sociopaths who feel no connection to us.

They exist in a different world from ours. Some live in a gang or criminal culture that is an undercurrent separate from mainstream society while others live in a dark, parallel universe of twisted illusions and  perverse fantasies and some care less for human life than they do for easy money.

In every case, however, one thing is clear. They do not share our values or more accurately, what we believe to be our values.

We have allowed our values to erode. We have removed the idea of consequences for our actions and have cheapened the value of life. We spend more time arguing about politics than working to end child poverty. We are more interested in the latest gadget from Apple than we are in the homeless and we place a higher value on things like the football program at Penn State than we do on the safety of children.

We are a society that clings to an illusion of values but which does little to protect or live them. We have the attention span of gnats and move from issue to issue as if each is only a momentary crisis but never focus long enough on anything that is truly important to actually see it completed. There is no consistency in or loyalty to the values we claim to hold important.

In our societies, the presumption of innocence is a cornerstone of our justice system and yet we see it undermined day after day across social and mainstream media. Our politics are the politics of entitlement rather than the politics of morality and our religions have become the religions of accusation rather than compassion.

We tear down and blame others as the reason for poverty, unemployment or for why we cannot have more free stuff instead of reaching out and lifting up those who struggle. We lower standards to mediocrity and the lowest common denominator rather than encouraging the attainment of excellence and finding pride not only in its achievement but in making the effort.

We live in fear of terrorism and have sacrificed our personal liberty for the illusion of security and have allowed our fear to build xenophobia against one group or another. We see terrorists and threats in anyone who doesn’t look like us. We lash out at Muslims labeling them all as terrorist threats while failing to understand that more innocent Muslims are slaughtered by extremists than we are. We feel no compassion for them.

We have allowed our governments to break our laws and violate our constitutions in the name of national security while we squabble like geese over presidential birth certificates and candidate tax returns.

The family has become irrelevant and increasingly disparaged by those who would justify their own different lifestyle all in the name of political correctness. More and more children are born in promiscuity than ever before and are being raised by those who are barely older than children themselves.

Five children are killed through abuse by members of their family every day in North America but we are too busy to do anything about it. More than a million children are missing but we have other issues with which to deal.

We have stood by and watched people encourage others to commit suicide online over live streaming video for the entertainment of others. We have aggressively defended against any form of government regulation of the Internet which might actually prevent crime, invasion of privacy, identity theft and child pornography. We defend our right to steal music and movies and the hard work of others.

We do all of this without ever stopping to consider what it is doing to our society, to ourselves and to our children. 

When it all gets too much for us, we simply throw up our hands and turn our backs on the problems confronting us and allow it to continue while criticizing those who continue to speak out. We do it but we don't want to hear about it nor do we want to be criticized for it.

We, quite simply, have become the greater threat to our own societies and safety. because we are the enablers of those who commit these random acts of violence in our communities.

Children learn by example and they learn from us. It is a fundamental element of life and is genetic. Even animals teach their young how to survive.  What are we teaching our children?

We no longer teach them the values of responsibility, accountability, integrity, loyalty, faith or hard work. We are too busy and increasingly, we are teaching them that there are no consequences to their actions, no requirement for hard work and that things are more important than they are. We plant the seeds of the next outbreak of violence every day when we refuse or are too busy to defend and uphold the values upon which our societies were founded. 

We turn the education of our children over to the state while we go about our busy lives and we teach our children that they have little value to us.

Life is cheap and not only to those who so callously take the lives of others. We cheapen life every day with our attitudes, our apathy and our arrogance. We may not have pulled the triggers but we helped to create the violence because we couldn’t find the time to uphold the values in which we profess to believe.

When we encourage our governments to break the law in order to maintain it, we teach others that there is no law. When we accept that the ends justify the means in order to protect ourselves from some real or imagined threat, we teach that anything can be justified.

Our societies aren’t under attack only from terrorists and criminals nor are they only under attack from those who are lost in a dark place. Like our infrastructure, our societies are eroding because we no longer work to maintain the fundamental values on which they were originally built. We are driven now by expediency, greed and fear rather than truth, responsibility and integrity.

As a result, while we may not have pulled the triggers, we helped to create the social order in which so many died needlessly.

These are terrible tragedies and I doubt we will ever truly understand the how or the why of them nor will never eliminate violence but we all share responsibility for the society that fertilizes its growth. 

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families who lost loved ones in Toronto and Aurora…and in every city and town that has been ravaged by this horrific and senseless ongoing slaughter of the innocent.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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