This Crazy World

It's official. The world has gone mad. So much insanity in the news lately.

Let's start with this whole Virginia Tech incident. Let me dive right in. A tragedy on so many fronts. I watched Dateline last night, and they paid homage to a few victims. It's tragic. People wake up on a normal morning and go to class like any other day and have to be subjected to some lunatic opening fire. My prayers go out to them and their families. A continuing theme in that people are just stupid. I've been angry and depressed at plenty of moments in my life. It never occurred to me that I should start spraying randoms with bullets. I thought mentally I was a bit off kilter, but not clearly as bad as SOME people.

What gets me about these types is that aren't there ever any signs? I don't know the answer because I don't think I've associated with anyone quite so disturbed. But I would think somehow, somewhere, there would be some signs leading up to this sort of thing. Not that I'm saying it could be prevented. I don't really know what I'm saying. But I know that I feel bad.

On the flip side of that, you get the media frenzy. This is a phenomenon which I cannot stand. Now you are flooded on TV with every single miniscule detail they can find. The situation gets picked apart, put together, and dissected all over again. How many times do we have to go over it? It's torturous. I can't even imagine what that feels like to the families of victims. This will go on for days, or weeks, until we've pieced together every single thing, including when the last time the killer masturbated. It's absurd. It's painful. The media has to stop.

You hear the overly dramatic cries of parents, of school kids all ages, saying "Oh we're never sending our kids to school ever again." And high school seniors saying "I was slated to go to Virginia Tech in the fall. Not anymore. My mom doesn't want me going away to school, period." Let's just put everyone in a bubble. I can't even deal. And all this nonsense is perpetrated by the media who has to constantly have a reaction. I mean for how many days did we watch the Twin Towers burning? I'm not saying people don't want to see. But do we have to see everything? It sort of desensitizes us to any emotion we might have. It's not enough anymore to just get the story. We have to get pieces of it, commentary, public outrage, editorials, all until we've been on such an overload that we can't even care anymore. We should be ashamed.

This brings me to the Imus issue. Which I don't even want to get into some kind of debate about. Let's just blame Imus and use him as our pariah for all that is wrong with race relations in America. I'm not saying if he was right or wrong. But for days on end, once again, we didn't hear the end of it. I don't understand why in this country we walk on eggshells and pretend that racial stereotypes still don't exist. We act like stereotyping is non-existent so that then when someone makes a comment like that we're shocked and appalled and completely dumfounded. Come on people! Let's not pretend what's going on here.

Let's not pretend that the civil rights movement ended with Malcom X and MLK Jr. Yeah, they made it all ok. No more racial profiling, stereotyping, discrimination, etc. It's just like the feminist movement didn't make it all ok for women. We know that sort of discrimination still exists. Who are we trying to fool? And do you think that Al Sharpton in the privacy of his own home doesn't go off on white america? This is just getting absurd. I'd like to go walking around in East New York without my Oasis t-shirt and see how that flies. I'm sure no one would say a word to me.

I'm not supporting one side or the other. I'm just saying that I can't pretend to be that shocked and outraged about it. This is par for the course. I hear worse shit on my corner or on the subway. I realize it's a public forum and how it's different. But as a nation, we have to stop fooling ourselves about what goes on between the races. We like to put up this front and say "Look at us, we're Americans, so progressive, so liberal. Racism? Not here! Discrimination? What's that?" Bullshit. Show me a place where that's true. Everyone in harmony. And if it's not people of color, it's sexual orientation. And we all know where our fearless leader stands on that issue.

Point being I don't need to hear about it anymore!! We are a fucked up nation. People are crazy. They do crazy shit. They say things they shouldn't. These aren't new issues. I'm not saying it's not important but there are more important things. We walk around everyday and live our lives, watch our tv with it's million news reports, listen to our racist radio and we are in the middle of a war people!! A WAR!!! Let's wake up. We have to stop letting the media frenzy control our thoughts and emotions. They will go on about a snowstorm for a week! Do we realize how ridiculous this is getting? At some point we have to shut it off and try to be productive human beings who can have a thought of their own. It's exhausting.

Amen.