The corrosion of humanity
By Tom Quiner
Should Hollywood be our role models?
Are mass public killings on the rise?
I pose the question in light of the latest murder spree that took place in Aurora, Colorado. Frankly, I can’t keep up with them all. We’ve reached a point in the evolution of our culture that not all mass public killings are front page news.
The most recent has particular notoriety because of the breathtaking breadth of the assault, coupled with its connection to the premier of an iconic film: “Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.”
So are mass public killings on the rise?
Yes.
Twenty-one took place from 1900 to 1965.
But from 1966 to 2009, we’ve experienced around 120.
[This data was compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota State Department of Corrections, and analyzed in his book, “Mass Murder in the United States: A History.”]
Why?
Why the explosion of mass public killings in modern times?
There could be some practical explanations, like we’ve got more people today than a century ago and a corresponding increase in the number of nutcases. But that doesn’t seem to square with the sudden explosion of these types of killings in recent decades.
Some blame it on the availability of guns. There may be something there, but guns have always been available. And there were fewer gun control laws on the books a hundred years than today.
There’s got to be more.
I suggest the culture has changed. We are observing the systematic corrosion of humanity in America. We live in an era characterized by the diminishment of man’s appreciation of the Other.
And when you devalue Others, you devalue yourself.
What has changed? For starters, the Ten Commandments were removed from schools and public spaces.
Our Judeo-Christian legal system can be traced by to the Commandments. They invoked a higher authority, God. They commanded us not to kill.
Why?
Because God said so. Kids looked at that commandment everyday at school until the courts demanded their removal in the fifties and early sixties.
What has changed? Human abortion became legal. We have aborted 53 million of our brothers and sisters. Human life became expendable if it is inconvenient.
What has changed? Marriage laws were changed based on feelings rather than function. No-fault divorce made it easy to extricate oneself from marriage vows if the going got tough, all at the expense of our children. (Yes, some marriages are irretrievably broken, and divorce is the answer, such as in abusive relationships. But no-fault increased divorce amongst salvageable marriages.)
What has changed? Ultra violence abounds in our entertainment. Young men are fed a steady diet of mass destruction in our movies and games. Mass killings in movies desensitize us to the pain other people feel through violence. I grew up as James Bond movies were coming of age where scores of villains were killed in every single movie. I turned out okay, didn’t I? Let’s face it, though, some folks aren’t wired quite right. Some are more likely to snap when fed a diet of carnage.
What has changed? Porn is everywhere. It’s a push of a button away from susceptible young men … and even middle aged men … and even older men … and even girls … and even their moms. Porn corrodes our soul. People are turned into objects to be used by others through the consumption of porn.
What has changed in my lifetime? God has been removed from the public square, and if we say something, the Left screams “separation of Church and State.”
What has changed in my lifetime? Abortion is the law of the land. If you protest, the Left screams about “women’s reproductive health.”
What has changed in my lifetime? The Hollywood Left churns out ultra violence for our kids. And if someone says something, the Left screams “freedom of speech.”
So what has changed? The American culture has been seduced by the Left and their corrosive devaluation of humanity.
We’ve seen the fruits of this “experiment.”
Time to turn the clock back and return to the American values that have served us so well before.
Psychopaths willing to murder have been around throughout the history of man. Today, they get international media coverage. If you want to be famous (infamous) and get your picture on TV’s all over the world, you just have to kill someone who is already famous or kill a lot of people for no apparent reason. Just look at that idiot in Arizona who shot Gabby Giffords.
I don’t think having the Ten Commandments on a wall in his school or having or not having porn on his computer would have made any difference with this guy’s actions. He is a freak of nature and deserved to be punished to the maximum limit.
Strange how mass public murder exploded since these things occurred.
The media has manuipulated history throughout time. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, and Al Capone were cold-blooded killers, yet look how they are portrayed today.
An Essay by Jack Weatherford
“Christopher Columbus’ reputation has not survived the scrutiny of history, and today we know that he was no more the discoverer of America than Pocahontas was the discoverer of Great Britain. Native Americans had built great civilizations with many millions of people long before Columbus wandered lost into the Caribbean.
Columbus’ voyage has even less meaning for North Americans than for South Americans because Columbus never set foot on our continent, nor did he open it to European trade. Scandinavian Vikings already had settlements here in the eleventh century, and British fisherman probably fished the shores of Canada for decades before Columbus. The first European explorer to thoroughly document his visit to North America was the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, who sailed for England’s King Henry VII and became known by his anglicized name, John Cabot. Caboto arrived in 1497 and claimed North America for the English sovereign while Columbus was still searching for India in the Caribbean. After three voyages to America and more than a decade of study, Columbus still believed that Cuba was a part of Asia, South America was only an island, and the coast of Central America was near the Ganges River.
Unable to celebrate Columbus’ exploration as a great discovery, some apologists now want to commemorate it as a great “cultural encounter.” Under this interpretation, Columbus becomes a sensitive genius thinking beyond his time in the passionate pursuit of knowledge and understanding. The historical record refutes this, too.
Contrary to popular legend, Columbus did not prove that the world was round; educated people had known that for centuries. The Egyptian-Greek scientist Erastosthenes, working for Alexandria and Aswan, already had measured the circumference and diameter of the world in the third century B.C. Arab scientists had developed a whole discipline of geography and measurement, and in the tenth century A.D., Al Maqdisi described the earth with 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude. The Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai still has an icon — painted 500 years before Columbus — which shows Jesus ruling over a spherical earth. Nevertheless, Americans have embroidered many such legends around Columbus, and he has become part of a secular mythology for schoolchildren. Autumn would hardly be complete in U.S. elementary schools without construction-paper replicas of the three ships that Columbus sailed to America, or without drawings of Queen Isabella pawning her jewels to finance Columbus’ trip.
This myth of the pawned jewels obscures the true and more sinister story of how Columbus financed his trip. The Spanish monarch invested in his excursion, but only on the condition that Columbus would repay this investment with profit by bringing back gold, spices, and other tribute from Asia. This pressing need to repay his debt underlies the frantic tone of Columbus’ diaries as he raced from one Caribbean island to the next, stealing anything of value.
After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India, or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply — human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit, and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus’ slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.
Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines and plantations which he, his family, and followers created throughout the Caribbean. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit — beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of Columbus’ arrival on Hispaniola, his men had killed or exported one-third of the original Indian population of 300,000.
This was the great cultural encounter initiated by Christopher Columbus. This is the event celebrated each year on Columbus Day. The United States honors only two men with federal holidays bearing their names. In January we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., who struggled to lift the blinders of racial prejudice and to cut the remaining bonds of slavery in America. In October, we honor Christopher Columbus, who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history. “
Other things have “exploded” as well, such as the number of unwed mothers and deadbeat dads, drug use, and take it from a teacher, respect for authority of any kind is basically gone.
I come from a family of teachers. I wouldn’t want to be a teacher today in this climate.
I can boil it down further: the greater part of two generations no longer attend church. Without God and faith, life becomes utterly devoid of meaning, and others’ lives are therefore valueless. In this state, we become a hollow, depraved race and all the other things listed in the post naturally follow.