I can't believe theres a NYT article on this shit, and among the COMMENTS (I know, I know...) was someone saying it's thanks to the culture of violent movies and violent videogames. That comment was HIGHLIGHTED BY NYT.
What the fuck is this shit? I know journalists aren't the most intelligent bunch of people but I expected them not to highlight such a dumb fucking comment. It legitimizes dumb shit like that, as if people who say that kind of thing have a point. Fuck that. Unbelievable how often violent video games come up when a shooting occurs.
Well it's simplistic sure but as I get older and watch kids I have to take a step back and really examine all the messages they are bombarded with on the daily. Fact is: there's too much shit being thrown at them and without a solid structure to put things in context and parse out the messages, they are left to figure shit out for themselves. Combine this with America's gun culture, our ideas that a person is a fully grown adult to be kicked out at 18 (especially if they're a guy), general lack of community involvement, isolationism, toxic internet feedback loops and you have a recipe for a lot of angry and confused youths.
People wonder why there's kind of a religious resurgence, where else in this society would you find community? In suburbia people rarely know their neighbors beyond a "hello." I grew up on the internet but I also socialized with kids in my neighborhood and had a pretty solid social structure in school. I honestly worry about how many youths expose themselves to hyper violent material, porn, etc without any real context to what they're seeing. Do I think everyone who goes through this will end up doing awful things? No. But I get a bit peeved at my generation's bullshit with "well we got exposed to the same shit and turned out fine." I don't think we did. I think we have a real blind spot for how toxic our society can be for kids on day 1.
I really, really, am rather disturbed by the toxic internet feedback loops that pretend to be support structures while they lay blame to a ton of external forces. They're constantly awash of violent rhetoric and egging each other on to go terrible things. I don't really care if some people think a lot of it is just bravado and farcical, it's toxic as hell. And as we've seen a couple times now some people will take that attitude into the real world* and do harm.
*And this is the other thing, we really let the internet become some separate entity from real life when it's not. Consciously or not we kind of ignore that we're all human beings talking on a platform and that words carry meanings. Communication is a human endeavor and regardless of whether it's typed on a computer or not, hateful rhetoric can encourage people to do abhorrent things.
