Friday, June 24, 2011

Suburban Culture of Violence

The local headlines in New York state have been dominated by the horrific slaying of four individuals in a pharmacy on Long Island. The story hasn't made it to Yahoo's "front page", perhaps because it doesn't "fit the narrative" pushed by the media noise machine.

The shooter was a white male, a veteran of the Army reserves, and he shot his victims with a licensed pistol. The shootings took place in suburban Suffolk County, and were committed in the course of the theft of prescription painkillers. Can't have this horror story getting in the way of the "conventional wisdom" concerning perpetrators and victims.

Especially poignant are the stories of the young woman who will be buried in her bridal dress and the seventeen-year-old girl who will be buried with her diploma.

I don't expect the odious Neal Boortz to discuss this horrific crime anytime soon- it just doesn't jibe with the cultural scenario he's pushing.

4 comments:

mikey said...

Americans keep choosing to believe their artificial narrative over the brutal truths their eyes can plainly see. And the result is they draw back to a position where compromise is impossible, and the only remaining path is a societal experiment best described as madness writ very large.

They take an aboslutist position on the second amendment, written in another time and another culture, and cannot find a way to protect people from the resulting sea of deadly weapons sloshing around our communities.

They take an absolutist position on taxation, to the point of believing in an absurd process wherein they pick a number and try to decide what government services can be shoehorned into that budget, rather than the more obvious path of deciding what government services they expect and then having a reasoned discussion about how best to pay for them.

They insist they represent the pinnacle of human cultural achievement, and yet cannot even reach the most basic consensus on human rights and equality.

The American experiment, in hindsight, was always doomed. It wasn't something that could be sustained in the face of human venality and greed. It trusted people too much, and left too much room for manipulation and demagoguery.

Even so, the endgame is so ugly, so lacking in basic humanity, that it saddens me...

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

All true, mikey, but the worst is at the top.

We've got a crop of plutocrats who are too greedy to know that you don't kill the goose that lays golden eggs. And they were trained at our best universities!
~

Anonymous said...

Fucking media wankers wouldn't want to propagate the message that guns are dangerous. They'll only highlight stories that propagate the message that minorities and poor people are dangerous. That way the plutocrats, as thunder says, get to sit in their gated communities and pretend that the misery they rain down on the lower classes is totally justified. 'Cause just look at what animals they are!

Of course, as this post hints at, the best way to exonerate yourself of the crime of being born poor or non-white is to serve in the military, but even that's not a sure thing. If you commit the crime of being too liberal while also poor or non-white, your military service magically disappears.

Substance McGravitas said...

Of course it would have been terrible if doctors had been allowed to be a little more loose with a prescription pad...