Creeping insanity

Driving down the street today, I started wondering about what makes so many of us want to be “first” – whether it’s first in the line-up at Tim’s or first into the intersection or through the light or first to get to the off ramp. You notice how fast people go on supposedly quiet streets? Think about the mad rush for the one obvious empty parking space at the Health Sciences Centre. I remember the street I used to live on at the top of New Pennywell Rd in St. John’s. Cars would come whipping through there – all the while tons of little kids were out playing on the street. I moved away from there about a year ago but it wouldn’t surprise me if there has been at least one funeral of a small child killed by an arsehole driver.

To me, this need to be “first” is just another symptom of the disease that is so pervasive. When you can’t get recognition in any other way, put the pedal to the metal and bask in the looks you get from fellow admiring idiots. I used to think of it as a testosterone deficiency. No longer, I think it’s a basic grey matter deficiency. There are as many women as men who demonstrate no consideration for those around them, so I’ve discounted the hormone theory and blame it on basic stupidity. Their self-satisfied grins seem to be confirm that assessment.

Ramp it up a couple of hundred notches and it leads to nutcases like the fellow in Toronto who killed two and injured a bunch more and the nutcase in Colorado who killed a dozen or more and injured twice that many. We have debates about gun control and parental upbringing but I have to wonder if the whole entertainment culture doesn’t lead the infirm to think they, too, can have their moment of glory. Look at the publicity we give them – media outlets around the world couldn’t wait to get that first picture of the idiot in Colorado with his “dyed red hair and sullen look”. Quite frankly, who gives a damn about him? There are situations in which the death chamber is the only destination for these guys.

Our society has changed SO dramatically and has become SO violent that we’re feeding the problem instead of helping to solve it. The sensationalistic, tabloid-fodder news media has become so self-important that it no longer practices journalism but rather a mutation of self-satisfying gratification that approaches the obscene. The Rupert Murdochs of the world have taken the bar as low as it can go.

Who can blame the punk with the spray can, the idiot behind the wheel, the jerk in the coffee line or the nutcase with the automatic rifle for thinking they are somehow better than everyone else?

After all, when one of these plastic movie stars is your hero, where is there to go from there?