When Will The Decision-Makers Finally Listen To Reason?

Subtitle: The Roots of This Senseless, Senseless Violence; The Culture of Winners Versus Losers, of Intolerance Versus Tolerance.

by Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo, Philosopher.

There really is no way for me to express with words how sad and angry this sick, senseless atrocity in Binghamton, New York makes me feel. I wish I could express my deep sympathy to each and every person whose loved one was murdered. Yes, there are reasons why people become extremely sick and we continue to ignore the obvious answers concerning how we can actually reduce such incidents from happening in the future, but there is never an excuse for such acts of violence...never! Obviously this was not perpetrated by someone with any remaining sense of humanity, compassion or respect for the humanity of others. And obviously the perpetrator of this most cowardly and disturbing criminal act of mass murder is further evidence of just how violent our world has become and how important it is for communities to find ways to provide the kind of social, emotional and physical intervention long before anyone reaches such a senselessly sick state of mind! And I am not talking about profiling people for the purpose of further disenfranchising them and making them feel even more threatened by society. For ignored and/or improperly and inadequately handled mental illness gets worse over time. Especially when the greater society at large is already plagued by a culture, and subcultures, of fortuitous violent conditioners, such as some types of video games, so-called sporting events, unjustified types of wars and improper military training methods, and certain types of movies that unrealisitically or too explicitly portray senselessly fortuitous scenes of violence, extreme cruelty and barbarism!

Another major factor is how much of our modern technologies are over-relied-on and/or misused, whereby people do not develop the right set of social graces and emotional sophistication to be able to create and maintain healthy social lives, both in terms of real platonic friendship(s) or friendship(s) of a more intimate kind. The re-enforcement of the expectation of quick, instant and superficial
self-gratification that lacks the ability to provide the kind of deeper, truly meaningful human social contact born of patience, tolerance, compassion, sharing and emotional and verbal honesty is very much at the heart of this catastrophic state of affairs! Too many persons are way too dependent on the kind of virtual reality electronic computer-based networking tools, which can never fully substitute the need for direct human contact, and yet too many people are living in fear of the fact that too many laws supposedly meant to better protect society tend to actually make it even more difficult for people to risk attemptying to befriend today’s stranger who was yesterday’s friend somewhere else and who could be tomorrow’s friend yet! In a sense we have managed to create a most unhealthy society by overlegislating social behavior, by throwing out the baby with the dirtwater, by failing to provide proper, relatively safe, alternative venues for people to meet and make new friends not based only on some set of narrow interests, but
based on our greater universal humanity! In a sense we cannot really have it both ways when it comes to living in open and democratic societies! We cannot have public law and government that is either neutral or even hostile to universalist human values, in effect societies which ignore the need for a greater sense of human connectedness and which ignore or oppose creative, relatively safe alternative venues for adults to release their frustrations in non-violent ways and where they can make new friends that are based on deeper emtional foundations! We cannot have a society that expects its citizens to be honest at work and when dealing with authorities but which somehow punishes honesty in human relations. You either have a society that only extols so-called conservative family-clan-centric social values, private elitist social groups and strict monogamy, which then, especially in hard economic times (but not only then), pushes the “losers” into extreme conditions that sometimes cause an already unstable person to explode in senseless rage and violence, or you have a society that seeks to accommodate to the most basic social, physical and matterial needs of the least of its members! A society that only awards its winners is a losing proposition! (A society that only awards its winners is a losing society!) A society that always has decent consolation prizes for those who did not win, that is to say a society that does not criminalize the natural needs of those whose matterial means are limited, is a winning society! Of course,
there are those who will point out the extreme failure of the Sixties Hippy Era and the kind of harm that comes from that kind of lax, laissez-faire, do as you please attitude! But to suggest that there is only two opposite extreme choices; one that is too Puritanistic for its own good and the other that is too loose for its own
good risks denying the possibility of a true alternative in which the traditionalist conservatives can still have their own lives in their private spaces and the responsibly progressive liberals can have their alternative lifestyles in relatively safer ways!

Whatever the specifics behind the personality traits of this mass murdering psycho may be, the fact of the matter is this: eight years of almost total rule by pseudo-democratic neo-conservative idealists has actually made things much worse in greater American society at large and these kind of atrocities are its result and would actually become less likely in a country that makes it perfectly clear that the only real American Way is that which is non-violent unity-in-diversity-oriented and in which government not only seeks to reduce access to the means to do harm, but seeks to work with the private sector to establish drug-free social venues where natural emotional and even physical intimacy is not discouraged! After all, there is a reason that the de-nazification of post-WW2 Germany included creating those kind of venues for adults to release excess stress and to develop deeper emotional relationships! It is only more recently in Germany that government once more began to meddle in the ability of poor adults to meet one another! Just as so-called Communism unleashed a chain of events that still destroys lives, even after the system has been gone, so do all other forms of extremist ideological systems, which includes that side of the Hippy Movement that mixed substance abuse with so-called Free Love, including that of the Neo-Cons!

The point is this: if we want a safer America (and World) then we need a saner America (and World), and if we want a saner America we need to realize that if those who are poor, unemployed and in great financial and matterial difficulty at least have all their basic, minimum needs provided for, especially their need for social relations, from purely platonic ones to ones that help sattisfy a need for intimate yet truly honest, respectful, physical and emotional relationships (including for those who are considered by the majority as odd-balls, non-conformists and into fringe lifetstyles), then people are less likely to totally lose their minds and become capable of such atrocities!