The Dark Night of the Dark Knight

I am sickened and saddened by today’s events in Colorado. Lord help a nation that produces affluent, intelligent young people who think it’s their God-given right to take out their disappointments and frustrations on innocent victims who have never done them any harm, and Lord help the victims, their families, and all of those who have suffered collateral damage as a result of the actions of this psychopath. Youngsters today grow up immersed in violence, from the television programs they watch to the movies they see to the video games they play—and just as doctors and nurses and rescue workers become hardened to the sight of blood and suffering, because they have to, seeing it day after day, so kids who see acts of vindictive and wanton cruelty everywhere they turn are desensitized to the horror of such events. The ten-year old girl who escaped an abductor this week did so by imitating something she’d seen on _Law & Order: Special Victims Unit_--a show I find too disturbing to watch at bedtime, though I am several times her senior. There was a 6-year old and an infant in that theatre at midnight last night—and heaven only knows how many tweens and teens. Please, parents, think twice and three and four times before you allow your impressionable youngsters to become immune to man’s cruelty to man. Haven’t we lost enough people to senseless, stupid, selfish violence in this country, and this world?