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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial: 7/30/99
Hearing is the last of the senses to go. So the victims who bled to death on the floors of the Atlanta yuppie palaces of commerce could hear the screams and the gunshots right up until the end. This latest round of slaughter combined two American passions-- quick money and guns. After killing his wife and kids, the shooter took his nine millimeter and his .45 and went to a stock day trading office to open fire. Day traders are sort of the pinnacle of end of the century American capitalism. They don't care about the companies whose stocks they buy. They don't care about anything beyond the few minutes--or few hours, if they're long-term investors--they'll hold onto the stocks. Their loyalty to anything other than themselves has the life span of a fruit fly. But here's the spookiest part of all--our reaction to the shootings. We've seen so many that it's just another massacre. We'll repeat the pattern: breathless breaking news bulletins; aerial shots of people fleeing in terror; interviews with tearful eyewitnesses; killing or capturing the shooter; and anguished post-mortems about why it happened. Except that we're starting to move beyond that last part. In many ways, it seems like we may not care why it happened. We've become so cynical and calloused that seeing another round of murders on TV is like watching pro wrestling. We know what's probably going to happen. I've seen this sort of thing before. It happens all the time in war zones, in places like Kosovo or Bosnia or Rwanda or Colombia or Cambodia. People shut down their ability to be sad or hurt or shocked. It's their way of surviving, their way of dealing with the constant destruction all around them. You also see a lot of it in the hard gangsta pose of kids in America's inner cities. They've been watching people die in the streets for a couple of generations now, so a few more don't merit much attention. One reason we're turning off is that we don't want to face the cause. So we argue about all sorts of peripheral issues. Is it guns? Knee-jerk liberals who cringe at the sight of a pistol say ban the guns while the miltia loonies say even more guns would solve the problem. Is it parents not raising their kids right? Then how to explain a forty-something who's a mass murderer and took out his own family as part of the bargain? But deep inside each of us, we can feel the real reason slithering around. We're seeing the end result of the every-man-for-himself society. We're less and less connected to anything outside of ourselves unless it's in cyberspace. Fewer of us than ever belong to churches or civic clubs or neighborhood groups. Our families are scattered like ashes after a fire. And the old American myth of self-reliance has reached a twisted pinnacle, since many of us are so tied up in ourselves and our own little world that we could care less about kids in Kosovo, or killings in Atlanta, or the people next door. We're at peace and we're prosperous. So why are we unhappy and violent? Because we're quickly becoming a nation of selfish cynics with access to guns. The only common purpose we have is that we're all looking out for number one. It's ironic that as we watch the numb scenes of day-trading slaughter we're marking the 20th anniversary of the Sony Walkman. It was the first electronic device ever that let us drift through the world with our own private soundtrack. We could cocoon ourselves comfortably with our own music, and never have to bother with what the real world was doing just outside our headphones. So we clap on the headphones and dial up our own computers and trade stocks by the minute and wait until the next news bulletin about some other loose screw who's killed five or ten or twenty people. And we wonder how long it's going to take before we lose our capacity to be shocked, or to even care. Just another massacre. Time to change the channel. |
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