UVALDE, TX - Right now, just a couple of issues that I was wondering if someone might help me clarify:
First off: Just how is it that we got here? (Nice, modest start to the discussion.)
How is it that, in a modern US society that vaunts, parades, brandishes, even weaponizes its compassion as never before (at least in my 63-year lifetime?) - a society that boasts a never-more-laborious concern for the seeming infinitude of possible human conditions, predicaments, choices, self-creations, -revisions and -transformations (gender- and otherwise) facing young people - how is it that, in such a fiercely, strenuously loving America, school bullying is not just alive and robust as ever, but seems to be intensifying its multimedia presence and pressure on a growing number of fronts. And even if we comfortably assume, in this post-Cold War world of Pinkerian Utopia (PU)*, that the bullying of today is not only less frequent, but actually far less cruel and more humane than it was, say, a generation ago, a question remains: why does it continue to provoke such horrific extremes of compensatory reaction - whether of rash suicide or, worst of all, of carefully orchestrated suicide/mass homicide?
*I.e., a place where - to use a very broad brush - basically everything is better, because practically everyone is so much richer (or was, until Trump, Putin, Orban, etc, came along).
In short, if today's bullying is in fact so much "milder," do its repercussions have to be so much uglier and more tragic? And even if we concede that our advanced, omnipresent media technology is the main driver, what about other, more or less buffering means of recourse and refuge for our young people? Again, in this Pinkerian best-of-all-yet-possible-worlds, there seems to be no shortage of concerned adults eager to smooth our children's bumpiest gender and other identity transitions. Do we really, then, have so few other mature grownups both trained and ready to ease the more conventional passages of adolescence?
Second of all: In a Western world never more loud and vehement in its claims of being the force for peace and stability across the globe, how is it that its principal leader - America - continues to lead the world in entertainment products more or less saturated with violence? I mean here not just horror/slasher vehicles, or the more luridly "amoral" kinds of crime/murder/suspense dramas; in particular I'm thinking of stories - often working from a rather brutally stark good-vs-evil premise - that at times seem to celebrate an especially intensive and ugly kind of violence. And even where "celebrate" is too strong a word, how often is large-scale horrendous carnage made not just one of the main problems of the storyline, but far too often (and usually in the form of a spray of firepower) the one most decisive and effective resolution?
All of which constant barrage of images and themes has - we can safely assume - virtually NO effect on the ways our already-troubled youngsters learn to "resolve" issues of loneliness, insecurity, rejection, media manipulation, harassment and (more and more these days?) even organized persecution.
Right, so that's settled. But I do have a third question. Is it possible that, in spite of all our state-of-the-art, customized-as-never-before Global Compassion, our children are really no happier than their counterparts of twenty-five years ago? But if anything, rather more confused, isolated, frustrated, adrift, angry? Or even simply less happy?
Then again - somebody else might argue - it never really was about happiness, was it?
(Meanwhile, continue to pray for the parents, siblings, schoolmates, teachers and others who are mourning the victims, and in particular for their mutual prayer, support and availability to each other.)
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