shakran

Running out the door, so I don't have time for a full reply. I'll answer your question once I get a few seconds.

But I wanted to point out that the babies get doses of whatever chemicals mom is exposed to in the womb. That's why pregnant women can't drink, and why they have to do things like avoid even touching those anti-baldness pills.

---------- Post added at 11:50 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:15 AM ----------

Societal values. in the words of Pirsig, ours is a "hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country." The drive of this society is a capitalistic free-for-all grabfest in which everyone's trying to get as much as they possibly can for themselves, whether they can use it or not, and not caring a whit about the people who aren't getting enough. It's like a wolf bolting as much food as he can get to, and then having to vomit it up later because he can't digest it all.

We are so hyperfocused on "me, me, me" that we fail to do things for the good of others or society at large, unless there's an obvious payout for us personally. And in that mad scramble for wealth and. . .Things. . . we forget to do important things like teach children that being an asshole is not a good way of life. We therefore teach each succeeding generation to be ever more greedy and callous toward their fellow man. And really, what difference is it if I kill you by blowing your head off with a shot gun, or I kill you by signing the refusal-to-pay letter from your health insurance company which means you won't get treatment for your fatal illness? You're just as dead, and the cause of it was just as much a casual disregard for human life on my part.

But in our society, if I shoot you it's a terrible thing and I go to jail for a very long time, and I'm never allowed to own a gun again. But if I kill you by refusing to honor my agreement to pay for your medical care in exchange for you giving me money for decades, that helps my company's stock price edge upward and therefore I am lauded and possibly promoted to a position where I can wield even more denial-of-payment forms, the instrument of your death.

Ours is a society in which money is God, to be worshiped and sought above all other considerations. Those who do not worship at the Altar of the Dollar are looked upon, sometimes benevolently, as kind of strange. The man who devotes his life to the Peace Corps, making damn near nothing so that he can help others is a weird hippie peacenik.

With such a callous attitude toward human life, rights, and dignity, vigorously defended by industry, corporations, and government alike, I really don't find it strange that people run around shooting each other.

I'm not saying in the case of this 11 year old kid who shot his step mom, the case that inspired this thread, that the kid was carefully taught by dad to not care if other people live or die as long as the kid gets what he wants, but society does indeed teach us that from a very early age. Even seemingly innocuous children's cartoons hammer that message home. Remember the Transformers? (oh boy. . i'm about to reveal the extent of my nerdishness here. . ) The Autobots and the Decepticons are fighting, constantly, over what? Energon Cubes. There's apparently plenty of them to go around, else one side or the other would constantly have to deal with disabled robots due to lack of energy. But they fight over them nonetheless. The message at its core is "It's OK to hurt people as long as you're hurting them in order to gain more (energon cubes) (things) (money) (whatever is important to you) for yourself.


In any capitalistic society, you're going to have the people who greedily suck up as many resources as they can, and you're going to have the people who, as a result, miss out on resources that they need and therefore get angry, if not desperate, about it. Capitalism is by definition a fight for limited resources. Someone's gonna get rich, but in order for that to happen, someone else has to be poor.

It seems to me that the root causes of all violent crime can be looked at from this admittedly oversimplified point of view. The gangbanger who murders the other gangbanger is trying to defend what little resources he sees himself as possessing (his turf, his pride, his car, whatever). The mafia don who orders a hit is trying to use fear to gather even more resources for himself (Pay me protection money or I send people to beat the hell out of you). The little boy who shoots his stepmother is trying to prevent someone else from coming in and taking away the resource of time with dad.

It really goes back to Powerclown's animalistic theory. Go up to a gorilla and snatch away its food, and see how long it takes before the gorilla beats the hell out of you. It's our instinct to protect that which we value, and to gather that which we value, by whatever means necessary, including violence.

And thinking about it, it's been with us since we came here. Indians taking up the space you want to use to grow food? Kill 'em, stuff the survivors into concentration camps that you call reservations, and hope they disappear.

The question becomes, then, how do we fix a problem that is caused by instinct and required by capitalism?