It’s frightening out there

Friday, December 4, 2009

In the wake of the horrific home invasion and murder in Mont Vernon in October, we now have a recent home invasion in Peterborough where, thankfully, no one was injured. But a knife-wielding intruder did sneak into a woman’s home and threaten her.

One is tempted to ask, what is our world coming to? But it’s a specious question. Our world is what it is: one that produces more and more frightening people and events and, frankly, doesn’t know what to do about it.

There is no way to predetermine who is dangerous, no way to stop a crime before it happens. At least two of the kids charged in the Mont Vernon murder seemed to be reasonable human beings when they were in high school. What happened? Should we have been able to predict aberrant behavior?

Is there something upon which we can blame the horrors that are being inflicted upon our world – four police officers gunned down in Washington State – or is all behavior just incidental? Are violent video games to blame? That’s certainly possible. What about terribly violent movies? Violent music?

The key word there is “violent.” Now, one could argue that since the inception of movies, violence has been prevalent in them and that would be true. But the violence of, say, John Wayne’s “The Searchers” was kid stuff compared to the violence of the video game “Grand Theft Auto.” Violence in movies of the 1950s never looked very real and was never meant to shock or inflame. That doesn’t seem to be the case in the current spate of violent movies and games, and even television.

But what are we to do about it? Movies, TV, games, etc., are protected, rightfully, by the First Amendment because they are, in a way, examples of speech, as is flag burning. OK, we have to accept that.

That means society has less of a role to play, as an entity, than do its individual members, particularly parents. If you are even contemplating for a moment buying your kid a violent game or movie for Christmas, please think again. You might think these things are harmless, but how can you be sure? You can’t be.

What you don’t want is to have to look back, years from now, and wonder ...

One of the things we should not do is jump on the capital punishment bandwagon that one local legislator hopes to get rolling. Anyone who thinks that the idea of the death penalty would have stopped four punks from perpetrating the horror in Mont Vernon is seriously mistaken. Nobody parses the consequences before they do something like than, any more than kids younger than 21 think about the laws against underage drinking before they go to an underage drinking party. Our thought processes simply don’t work like that.

If you want to support capital punishment, be honest about it: it’s revenge, not a deterrent.

But let’s first try to stop our kids from getting to the point where they think breaking the law is cool. If you absolutely need to buy them some electronic thing, buy them Kindles. Or, better yet, real books.