"There are worse things than being poor."
--Pier Paolo Pasolini
BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA--None of this should be a surprise in a society that throws-away people and provides no real social safety-net. It also shouldn't surprise anyone in a culture that has no real value for human-life, and this can be another one that underscores how we aren't learning anything. I gotta be frank: I don't care. Nobody cares about the tens-of-thousands that die every month in the third world, the poor who rot-away due to the inherent shortcomings of our economic system, or the silent suffering of the average American who's straining under an inhuman system. People can only take so much abuse and neglect, and so, in a society that tolerates these things, an event like this is just more of the same. For those who always wonder why these things happen: start thinking.
The pundits are going to demonize the deceased as "disturbed"--he may well have been, I wouldn't argue this, but is he a Richard Speck or Charles Whitman? We may never know why this happened.What I'm trying to highlight is that nobody really cares at all about anyone affected by this, and nobody has any genuine desire to discover why he really murdered (at this writing) 32 human-beings. If we really did, we'd be running-around hunting our representatives and demanding reforms. Most of us don't want to face the responsibilities of living in a technological society. But when you know that you can sink in this society without anyone caring, these events become more-likely, and they're going to become a daily-occurrence in the future. As people are more-and-more dehumanized by bourgeois-capitalism, as the wars continue, life will become more devalued. As workers, most Americans know full-well that they are "reified" (objectified/dehumanized) by their employers. They are seen as objects to be used, exploited, and discarded.
If we can learn anything from such events as Virginia Tech, it's that it doesn't really matter in a society that has no value for that which is human. It won't be some nuclear catastrophe that destroys humanity, it will be humanity that destroys itself. We are seeing the acceleration of this process, and it's only going to worsen as people lose their ability to empathize and communicate meaningfully. When individuals renounce the social contract--sticking-together as a society for our mutual-survival and prosperity--it means that they have perceived the contract to have been broken by the rest of society. The truth is, we all have neglected the social contract, and we're paying-for-it. The shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech are warning-signs, but the machine just rolls-on, and the demands of business and capital must be fed regardless. Save the phony moralizing.
You are so right, and said it well.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the sentiments, we all stand accused. Myself included. We're already trying not to learn anything from this, but that's how it always goes with this kind of a social event. It's sad, because it insures it will happen again--something I don't want, and most reasonable people don't want.
ReplyDeleteHowever, when things are unequal, and when people have no social-support networks like they did thirty-years-ago, these events become inevitable. The fact that most people only know about three other people, when they used to know at least twenty should be a matter of extreme concern, but again, the wants of business and capital trump what individuals and society need to function properly. This young-man is a tragedy.