The value of life

As all of us, I have witnessed these days with horror the massacre of 26 young children and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut. These episodes of sudden rage of a lonely young person are becoming, unfortunately, more and more frequent, since the episode in Columbine (Colorado). The death of so many young children, while they were at school, together with their teachers is really devastating.

A lot has been discussed these days about the necessity to control the possession of weapons in the United States. The lack of controls in the United States for the purchase of a weapon is something that the Europeans find hard to believe and which reminds us of the times of the Far West. I am certainly not going to side with the NRA and defend the right of every citizen to have an arsenal in his house, but I would like to nuance something this simplistic argumentation.

First, there have been similar episodes happening in Europe as well (I remember one in Scotland, a second one in Finland and several of them in Germany). Establishing a direct relation between the lack of controls for the possession of weapons and these episodes may be premature. It is obvious that the authors needed a weapon (or several) for their actions, but I think that this debate takes us far from the real core problem.

The real core problem, which from time to time comes to light in the form of these terrible episodes of senseless violence, is the widespread trivialization of the violence in our lives, as Samuel L. Jackson has pointed out (although I do not agree with him not blaming videogames or movies). There is a full generation who was grown up with violent videogames, where one can easily kill one thousand people in one evening. I know because I also did it, from time to time. Some of the most successful movies are quite bloody as well (see the battles at Lord of the Rings, for example) and the same can be said about the language used in music.

Furthermore, in addition to this environment of free violence, our society has made our teenagers more vulnerable to the bullying of others, which has become a real problem in the Western world, and more lonely. The parents nowadays do not have time to spend with their children doing nothing (not running from one activity to the other) and to teach them the value of life, of their own life and of the life of the others. The scenario of a teenager spending his evenings playing videogames in his room is familiar to all of us.

The combination of these two factors may become explosive in some cases, with the tragic results known by all of us. I just hope that our society is learning the lesson to avoid any other small and tiny town becoming famousdue to an episode like the one which took place in Newtown some days ago.