SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

CAUSE AND EFFECT   

Ask yourself, ‘What has changed over years of student conflicts’?  

After the Second World War Junior and High school students in the late 40s and 50s would challenge each other with their fist. As time progressed the young individuals found more power by joining a local street or neighborhood gang, but they for the most part still only ‘rumbled’ or fought it out with fist or bats. Guns were not considered in any norm.

After the murder of JFK on the street in Dallas, high school and college students began taking their individual and collective frustrations to the public streets all across America. What is so different in today’s world ?  All events related above were on a ‘face to face’ encounter. Today’s youth have lost a good deal of their humanity by only communicating with a two inch screen and text messages from a piece of technology that cannot see facial expressions  or convey any human feelings that are found in a ‘face to face’ relationship. This technology has enhanced a more inward unattached human relationship between individuals.

Years ago when a girl would break up with a boy he could see her feelings and with his own inward and outward feelings respond in kind face to face. Ending relationships or being fired from a job by text message is a way of dodging the true feeling of dealing with one person to another. While this type of communication is beneficial to one party it can devastate another by the lack of human interaction to a perceived serious personal event.

Leisure time spent with ‘real life graphics’ and the choice of a multitude of weapons where young minds can kill hundred of human-like-beings at their bidding must be contributing to the loss of  community humanity.  

People today, as in all of human history,  are controlled by what they see and hear the loudest. In today’s world the sound of gunfire immediately causes an emotional reaction “that something must be done’ all the time overlooking the underlining cause or having conversations that miss the center of the problem.

The solution lies in the restoration of our individual humanity which our youth so desperately need if we as a nation are to survive. We must look inward for the answers.  The Politicians will never have the answers to this problem. Only the common sense of parents as they are faced with the decision of buying that new ‘Game Box’ or the phone for their children can provide the future and well being of tomorrow’s youth. We as a society got along for decades without these items and in doing so raised great generations that solved problems face to face while at the same time building the human spirit.

Technology has it’s place and need…..but so does the quality and safety of life for our youth.

William R. Rice Jr.

Wilton