It seems for the past week or so, the entire world (yes, world, when I was in Spain they showed news coverage of this 24/7 too) has been shaken up by the school shootings in Littleton, CO (I think thats the name of the town, though don’t hold me to that). What amazes me about this story is not the fact that two people went into a school and shot a bunch of people (apparently this is the seventh in-school multiple homicide in teh past 18 months), its the fact that the media has given extensive coverage this, and has exploited it for all its worth.
I suppose with the impeachment trial over and done with, and the only thing remaining of that issue is a few jokes, the media needs something new to pounce on and make a dollar off of. And they have done just that. Everywhere I turn someone is talking about how terrible this tragedy is. Don’t get me wrong, I think the senseless killing of people, which is pretty much what happened in this case, is wrong. The two boys who did this probably wanted to kill themselves, and figured they’d make as big of an exit as possible, and in doing that, they have succeeded.
Thats not the thing that really bothers me though, its the fact that a nation like America (and other nations too, most of my knowledge of what happened came from a British paper) can exploit something like this, and the masses can swallow it up. But I suppose it makes good news. Who is the sicker person in this case? The nazi boy who goes into a school, kills about ten people or so, or the average American who buys the newspaper with the headline of “Neo Nazi Massacres Innocent Teens In School”?
The boys who did this knew very well that if they were to pull off something like this, they would have the entire country (and others) all wrapped up in it. If they seriously wanted to kill people, and nothing else, they would have just blown up the entire school with everyone in it. But they didn’t, and they have gotten everyone all caught up in the story. I’ve seen it described as “one of the worst tragedies in history”. The people that make those statements have swallowed this lie hook, line, and sinker. I don’t think this can be called one of the worst tragedies of the decade.
Does this outrank the 500,000 innocent people massacred in Rwanda? Or how about the hundreds of innocent Iraqis killed in the bombing of Baghdad in the Persian-Gulf war? The genocide that’s been occuring for the past ten years in the former Yugoslav provinces? And those are just things that happened in the past ten years. Ten years. Turn back the clock further, just in American history, lets forget about the rest of the world for the moment. Pretty much from 1492 – the present day there has been a holocaust against the Native Americans.
When the Spanish landed in Mexico and South America, their weapons and diseases killed 30 million people, wiping out the native peoples to those areas. When the British landed in what is now called the USA now, they started an undeclared war 400 years ago which is still on today. The war reached its peak in the late 1800’s, when the US army was sent west to pretty much wipe out all native civilization to make way for American railroads. The surviors were then placed on reservations, where little of their culture remains, many tribes that didn’t survive had their culture completely destroyed.
And this is just one instance of American tragedies that the people just don’t seem to care about. Theres still World War I, a useless imperialistic war, which killed millions of people, which out of that war only came World War II, which killed millions more people. Nevermind all of the other wars, like Vietnam, where American soldiers basically shot anyone in sight, civilian or not. And how many Americans care about all the people who died in the wars above? How many millions of people lost their lives for no reason, and how many millions more people wept over their deaths?
And how many Americans today care about those people? How many Americans cared about those people when these tragedies happened? I bet not nearly as many as today who supposedly care about the people in Littleton. Don’t get me wrong or anything, what happened in that school was terrible, and should not have happened, but the media does not care about human life when they report this story, they only care about the dollar (or pound, or peseta, or whatever currency the country happens to be) that goes in their pocket.
