Has our society really degraded to this point?

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/08/04/four-people-held-for-trial-for-shooting-at-septa-bus/

A recent incident in Philadelphia prompted me to ask myself this question. A lady was on a SEPTA bus with her misbehaving child, whom she proceeded to spank. A fellow passenger took it upon himself to admonish the lady for spanking the child, threatening to turn her in to DHS. The lady gets on her cell phone and calls a friend relaying what had happened. The bus is met at the next stop by two armed men who help the lady and her child get off the bus. The lady then points out the man who admonished her and tells the men to open fire. Thankfully they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn door and no one was hurt. The incident was caught on tape and the men were arrested.

Is this really where we are as a society? There are many more examples of brazen indifference to human life that can be added to this but the bottom line is we seem to have lost our moral compass.

The sad part of the above story is that there was an 80 year old woman on the bus who had no idea what was going on and was walking up and down the aisle trying to figure out what to do.

 

[moreluck]

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/08/04/four-people-held-for-trial-for-shooting-at-septa-bus/

A recent incident in Philadelphia prompted me to ask myself this question. A lady was on a SEPTA bus with her misbehaving child, whom she proceeded to spank. A fellow passenger took it upon himself to admonish the lady for spanking the child, threatening to turn her in to DHS. The lady gets on her cell phone and calls a friend relaying what had happened. The bus is met at the next stop by two armed men who help the lady and her child get off the bus. The lady then points out the man who admonished her and tells the men to open fire. Thankfully they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn door and no one was hurt. The incident was caught on tape and the men were arrested.

Is this really where we are as a society? There are many more examples of brazen indifference to human life that can be added to this but the bottom line is we seem to have lost our moral compass.

The sad part of the above story is that there was an 80 year old woman on the bus who had no idea what was going on and was walking up and down the aisle trying to figure out what to do.

I posted the clip yesterday under TV News (#27).................I thinks it's "gangsta" and people can laugh, but between rap and that cop killing video game, Grand Theft Auto , the country has gone downhill in the moral category. Let's face it, when Will Smith was a rapper, it was "innocent".....now, it's lethal and I can't even type the title of Cee-lo's song on the site.

Dad's aren't in the homes anymore. Mom's are working and gone too. Kids are left on their own and no supervision.

 

[soberups]

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/08/04/four-people-held-for-trial-for-shooting-at-septa-bus/


Is this really where we are as a society? .

Unfortunately, yes.

People like the ones in the video have no conscience and are totally indifferent to the value of human life.

 

[wkmac]

Unfortunately, yes.

People like the ones in the video have no conscience and are totally indifferent to the value of human life.

In some sense, maybe these people are in fact a direct reflection of what we are and what we've become. We've just become accustomed and desensitized to the devaluing of life and while kids show this on the streets as More seems to rightly allude, we adults set the standards in our own actions and the first place we illustrate this is in the being and nature of gov't we elect. Follow me or die so if we say otherwise to kids, do we not look like the biggest hypocrite?

More,
I agree about the video games but you should also include stuff like Call of Duty and Full Spectrum Warrior (as of Sept. 2008' FSW thanks to the US Army became a free internet download). The military uses such Gamecraft to mentally prepare the battlefield soldier to kill. The problem is this same gamecraft is drilled down to the youth level, especially the pre-teen and early teen male who can be easily molded with such grand illusions. Come recruitment time and age, many of these kids are mentally ripe to sign up with little thinking and to make matter worse, with such sorry job prospects, in some sense who can blame them. Many wonder if the high mental problems of returning soldiers was compounded by the fact that they lived the disconnected world of video but then the realities of the battlefield, the death, blood and gore shattered those illusions. It poses an interesting question and the sad part is the test subjects for such study are very real people who many may never recover.

If you think I'm stretching the gamecraft theory a bit then maybe you might consider Lt. Col Dave Grossman, author of "On Killing" who teaches what is called Killology has written much on the mental effects of violence on kids. To quote Grossman on violent military based gamecraft and TV violence more generally,

How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture.

Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's just TV." And they nod their little heads and say, "okay." But they can't tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's what it is like at that level of psychological development. That's what the media is doing to them.

Now here's the scarier part for you to consider. Your grand daughters are around a lot of these kids or they themselves might be a hapless victim influenced by the obvious self interested brain washing. These games can be dangerously addictive. It's one thing for a kid to enter military service for some patriot fulfillment or some personal reason or duty to just serve in that capacity. Whether I agree or not, can't argue the honor for such self sacrifice but to use a game console to mentally prep a kid with conditioning just strikes me as some 21st century form of a Fascist nightmare.

The problem of violence is at our core from top to bottom and yet so embedded that to even question it you are forced to question the structure of society itself and therefore fear drives people away from doing so. The first hint people suspect you questioning society as they know it and out comes the peer pressure to return to ranks of face isolation and abandonment. No individual thinking allowed and Col. Grossman sure makes a case as to just how far this ideal has leeched down into the public psyche. As a result, violence becomes an auto response but then the otherside of this equation is that just as good as the Al Qaeda terrorist is to the military industrial complex, so to is a public bred towards violence for the Prison Industrial Complex.

 

[wkmac]

First we must understand the magnitude of the problem. The murder rate does not accurately represent our situation. Murder has been held down by the development of ever more sophisticated life saving skills and techniques. A better indicator of the problem is the aggravated assault rate -- the rate at which human beings are attempting to kill one another. And that has gone up from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957, to over 440 per 100,000 by the mid-1990’s (Statistical Abstracts of the United States, 1957-1997).
Even with small downturns recently, the violent crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is true not just in America but worldwide. In Canada, per capita assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993. According to Interpol, between 1977 and 1993 the per capita assault rate increased nearly fivefold in Norway and Greece, and in Australia and New Zealand it increased approximately fourfold. During the same period it tripled in Sweden, and approximately doubled in: Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales, France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland. In India during this period the per capita murder rate doubled. In Mexico and Brazil violent crime is also skyrocketing, and in Japan juvenile violent crime went up 30 percent in 1997 alone.
This virus of violence is occurring worldwide, and the explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries (Grossman, 1999b). Like heart disease, there are many factors involved in the causation of violent crime, and we must never downplay any of them. But there is only one new variable that is present in each of these nations, bearing the same fruit in every case, and that is media violence being presented as “entertainment” for children.

A Virus of Violence

 

[moreluck]

You're right also about the games.....but I could only remember the one.......it was a big deal when it came out.

 

[menotyou]

The government needs to stop patting girls on the back financially for having kids out of wedlock.

 

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

The government needs to stop patting girls on the back financially for having kids out of wedlock.

Would you prefer aborting the fetuses of any unwed female?

 

[trplnkl]

Would you prefer aborting the fetuses of any unwed female?

Is that the only alternative?

 

[UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)]

Is that the only alternative?

Of course not. We could always mirror China and set a limit on how many kids we can have. We could also set a limit on the number of kids a mother on welfare will receive support for. We could go so far as to order sterilization for women who are unable to provide for their children without public assistance.

I understand where she is coming from as I see it every day.

 

[menotyou]

The welfare system in NYS is out of control. Not to mention, why do people woth 3 kids who make $7000 a year, if they are lucky and getting $23000 a yr in assistance, getting $12000 a year back in taxes from the FEDERAL gov't? This system is out of control.As for aborting fetuses, have you seen how these 'women' raise these children? I wonder if it wouldn't be better in the long run for the society as we are the ones subjected to their existence.