Cassi Creek: There
are more generation gaps than we ever imagined.
“(CNN) -- A
juvenile has been arrested by Spokane police in connection with the beating
death of an 88-year-old World War II veteran this week, police said Friday.
“It's the second time in a week
that a seemingly random attack by teenagers has claimed a life.
On August 16, a 23-year-old
Australian baseball player attending college in Oklahoma was gunned down in the town of
Duncan.
One of three teens police
arrested in that shooting said they carried it out because "we were bored
and didn't have anything to do."
I find it impossible to understand why anyone would randomly
select and kill another human. The
increase in such crimes since the WWII and Boomer generations is sufficient to
make me wonder what are the primary factors that have spawned a generation so contemptuous
of the rights of others.
There is
often blame affixed to video games – increasingly violent, movies that are
simply acts of violence daisy-chained together, and the two-job family/single
parent family, resulting in unsupervised children. I
grew up in a 2-job family. While I did
my share of stupid teen-ager things, I never felt any need to cause harm to
another person.
The ease of
access to firearms, legal or illegal, is in part a major contributing factor to
the widespread violence that has spread beyond the urban cores to the small
towns. The political party propaganda
designed to polarize the populace is a source, as it dehumanizes our view of
others.
We’ve watched
our populace change from “The Greatest” to the currently apparent worst. We’ve reached the point where gang leaders
will beat entire families to death over a video game player left behind during
eviction of squatters. We now see
murders committed to relieve boredom. We
now see WWII veterans and anyone else who happens to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time beaten to death. Some of
this violence is driven by racial hatred, bi-directionally. Some is stoked by religious fanaticism. Some is generated by people who are just
plain mentally ill.
I know each
generation has a component, which will complain about the following
generations. I’m in that cohort for my
generation.
The
percentage of people involved in such violent crimes is small compared to our
overall numbers. Our 24-hour news cycle
and improved means of gathering local news events of note make it seem as if
the frequency of such crimes is climbing rapidly. But when we compare our nation’s frequency of
such crimes to that of other industrialized nations, we see the U.S. as the
leader in such crimes.
We need to find
some way to identify causation and to eliminate these acts of senseless
violence.
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