Brutally Honest Rant - 04/18/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Unacceptable Truths – Public Tragedies
Audio Transcripts
04/18/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Well I suppose I should talk about it, shouldn’t I?

You know… the mass-shooting over at Virginia Tech.

I suppose somewhere there is this unwritten rule that says that no conversation can take place without mentioning the most horrific tragedy of the moment. I’ve seen this with other mass-shootings too. Doesn’t matter if it’s in a school or a workplace or a Texas clock tower, we gotta talk about it.

And yeah, I’m going to be doing the same thing here… but the public attention on this tragedy is also a good opportunity to get out a few more “Unacceptable Truths”. You know, things that are true, but we seriously REFUSE to accept them as such.

And I’ll start out with THE BIGGEST unacceptable truth on this subject… and THIS one is directed straight at the media!

SATURATION is not a substitute for INFORMATION!

I spent most of my time at home on Monday with the TV set turned OFF! Do you know why? Because the cable news channels were repeating everything over, and over, and over again!

Look, I don’t need to hear the same story played and replayed endlessly! This is why I don’t like having major events happen because every news network will want to rehash and regurgitate the same thing over and over again!

And CNN is by far the WORST right now. EVERYTHING is a “breaking news” item. Oh, wait, hold on…

(Audio – News into)

This just in: CNN reports that one of the investigators handling the Virginia Tech massacre just picked his nose and scratched his ass! They will have live IN-DEPTH coverage of this BREAKING STORY as soon as they can find a bunch of idiots who can pretend to be experts to discuss the possible social and legal ramifications.

Look, it sounds stupid, but that’s pretty much the bulk of the cable news networks right now. EVERYTHING is an “urgent” breaking story to them. If they’re talking about a subject and they get handed something new about it, then they treat it like they were announcing the end of the world.

Oh, and how about some of the video being aired? CNN kept on repeating this jumpy cellphone video of police officers staking out positions while you can hear gunshots from inside the classroom building. You don’t really SEE any of the violence, but the air-fluffed media personalities were quick to call it “grizzly footage of THE CARNAGE”. Oh please, give me a break! That video made the Zapruder film look like a Spielberg blockbuster in comparison! And it goes right along with the peephole video of police officers moving down a dormitory hallway. Yeah, that’s BREAKING NEWS right there! That’s freaking Pulitzer Prize quality!

I understand that a 24-hour news network needs to fill a lot of time, but if you don’t have anything new to offer at the moment then dammit MOVE THE HELL ON and get back to the story in a little while! There’s more going on in the world that just ONE news story.

That is just one the many “unacceptable truths” when it comes to these situations. And as long as all of the media outlets engage in that fallacy, then there’s nothing that can be done about it… except of course to turn off the television sets, turn off the radio, and not buy newspapers for a couple of days. Why do you think people have started to watch the Food Network and Home and Garden Television?

Here’s another one: all of these horrific mass-shootings do not “just happen”. Every single one of them has some event that set things off.

The media likes portray these shooters as lonely disturbed time bombs. They keep to themselves, they’re isolated, and it’s just a matter of time before they just… go off… for no reason whatsoever.

Well I’ll let you in on a little secret: I know a little bit about those “time bombs”, because for the longest time I was afraid that I would be one of them! I was also a loner. I also kept to myself. I also had issues with depression. Still have them. And unlike our unnamed shooter, I didn’t have access to resources to deal with my problems. The people who were supposed to “help” me didn’t. I had to deal with this on my own. Maybe one quarter of all of the courses that I took in high school and college were taken in part to deal with my problem on my own because nobody else was willing to. I plunged myself into dozens of social activities, sometimes at the expense of my grades, just so I wouldn’t feel like a loner, and even that didn’t work. It wasn’t because of my not wanting it bad enough or because I didn’t try hard enough. Other people let me down and there was nothing that I could do about that. I just didn’t fit into their plans and into their view of how the world should be.

So yeah, I know “a little bit” about that anger that builds up. I know about the natural injustices that exist in our society, and about the frustrations and aggravations that grow and fester like a cancer. The person who is alone doesn’t have an outlet for those things. They can’t turn to a friend or a loved one to get some measure of understanding or compassion.

And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about high school, college, or our adult lives, these things build and build, and without some kind of release or outlet, it is just a matter of time before some event triggers that person to react in ways that everyone regrets.

The person who “goes postal” doesn’t do so at random. There is a reason for their action. They are carrying out what they believe is justice.

You go back to the high school shootings. You go back to the workplace shootings. You go back to the disgruntled postal workers, where the whole phrase “going postal” came from, and you find a pattern. These are people who are isolated, alone, stigmatized, tormented, and then something happens that puts that person over the edge.

Kids can be cruel, and adults equally so, but as Clint Eastwood once said “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”

But, of course, that too is an “unacceptable truth” in our society.

Here’s another one: this asinine belief that the violence in our society in things like our music and movies and games is causing these shootings. Please! That’s like pouring gasoline in a room, striking a match, and then blaming the wooden floor for being so combustible. The unacceptable truth here is that violence in our society is a SYMPTOM of a much larger problem that we systematically REFUSE to deal with.

Remember that bit about natural injustices that exist in our society? THAT is the real problem! There are plenty of people who feel isolated, alone, and shut out from what they see is the great and wonderful world happening all around them that they can’t take part in.

Do you know why movies like “Fight Club” are so popular? Why they strike a cord in our lives? Because some of the elements of that movie, and of the book that it is based upon, are TRUE! There are people out there in the world that feel left out. People who work hard and play by the rules and still feel like they’re getting screwed out of the basic things that everyone else takes for granted!

They’re told to get help, and then that help fails. They’re told to keep themselves busy, and they can’t. They’re told to just deal with it, and they can’t. So they react. The violence isn’t the problem. Our social interactions are the problem.

And all of these demagogues in the media and in politics are only making matters worse! All of these people who are saying that “violence in the media is BAD and we need to do something to BAN IT” and all of the people using this tragedy in their self-appointed crusade to ban guns are not doing anything to change society for the better. All you’re doing is leaching the tragedy for your own personal crusade, and that is shameful and disrespectful.

I have to give the Governor of Virginia some credit. At least HE was quick to go in front of the media and ask that people NOT use this situation to push for knee-jerk legislation. That is a brave stance, and I seriously hope that others follow suit, not just for this situation but for all future tragic events. It is high time that we end the “bloody shirt” crusades!

But that unacceptable truth is still there. It’s not the violence in our culture that is causing these tragedies to happen. It is just a convenient scapegoat to avoid having to do anything to deal with the REAL source of the problem. It’s easy to blame it all on TV and video games and rap music and wash our hands clean of the matter than to actually wonder why people like this shooter are out there.

It’s easy to simply say “ban guns”, but unlike other countries, we’ve had to deal with guns in our society and our culture. And the operative words here are “deal WITH guns”. Look, how the hell do you expect people to “deal” with other dangerous things in our world like drugs or alcohol if we’re substituting prohibition for some utopian fantasy when it comes to guns?

Yes, guns are weapons, but so are broadswords and rapiers. Guns just happen to be easier to use than a knife, or a sword, or a machete, or a hatchet… or, for that matter, a box-cutter. When Lizzie Borden committed her grizzly crime, which was just as shocking and sensationalized back then as our recent tragedies are today, nobody used it to propose a waiting period for buying hatchets or an outright ban on them.

Okay, I have one more unacceptable truth for people to chew on, and this one is a doozey.

Once again we gotta go back to the media here. The media likes to talk about these tragedies in the gravest of terms. They like to call these tragedies an “EPIDEMIC of violence” as if this was some sort of communicable disease that can be treated and inoculated from.

And they’re not the only ones using that line. The liberals are picking up on that for their anti-gun legislation and their new calling to supposedly “clean up” the airwaves.

The conservatives are also using it, but for a slightly different reason. The conservatives are picking up on this terminology to push for theocratic measures. They want to impose school prayer – preferably Christian prayers of course – and posting the Ten Commandments in every government building. They want people to think that all of these shootings are all “God’s punishment” for America not being “religious” enough.

Well let’s get brutally honest here… the biggest of the unacceptable truths here is that these tragedies, which shock and sadden us all, are NOT “epidemics”, nor are they “God’s punishment”. These tragedies, though horrific in nature, are symptoms of a flaw in how we deal with other people.

We’ve built up these various systems to deal with other people. Various levels of interaction depending on where that person stands in our own guideline of how things “should” be. And unfortunately there are some people who just don’t fit into those “perfect plans” of ours. These tragedies remind us that our little systems of dealing with others aren’t as “perfect” and “flawless” as we think they are.

And it doesn’t matter how many times we pray, or to whom we pray to, or how many times we see violence on TV or in the movies, or whether or not there are guns available… these tragedies will continue until we realize that the fault lies not with the heavens or the airwaves, but amongst ourselves.

It’s much easier for us to say that this is an “epidemic” because it absolves us of any responsibility of fixing things and accepting the fact that maybe… just maybe… WE need to do something about it. And that is REALLY why this is an “unacceptable truth”.

Mind you, I’m not bringing these things up to absolve the shooter in Virginia Tech for what he did. I saw the path that I was being led towards in my own life and I chose to go with what little bit of hope remained within me that something better will happen. Other people, like these people who carry out these shootings, make different choices. This guy chose to embrace his pain and isolation until he reached that final breaking point. He made the decision on his own. All I’m doing is pointing out how he got there and why WE have to deal with it, and hopefully do something to make sure that the next person that we come across in similar situations won’t fall down that same path.

(Computer – some appropriate stuff that you have to listen to understand)
(Fade Music In – “Who Am I” by Peace Orchestra)

There’s something about this particular tragedy that sort of bugs me. There is this collectivist chant going about both in Virginia and pretty much over the Internet too with people saying “we are Hokies”. Well I hate to burst your bubble, but so was the shooter, and that still didn’t change the fact that he went postal. If there was something magical and life-changing about a specific college, then why didn’t it prevent this tragedy from happening?

The truth is that there is nothing magical about the college. The “magic” really comes from the individuals who make up the community.

But again, if we’re continually transfixed on the communal, then we forget all about the contributions of the individuals. That THAT is what has led us to this problem in the first place.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
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