…is actually really good. I want to start out by saying that the event that took place at VA Tech this morning is a horrible, awful tragedy, and I in now way wish to diminish what the victims and families and friends of the victims are going through. My argument, however, is that tragedy has been happening through all of recorded history, and events like this remind me that people will quickly forget this as they fall into the rhetoric of how the world is falling apart.
The fact is that massacres have occurred in public places for a very long time; massacres are not a new phenomenon (the Bath School Disaster of 1927 was the deadliest school massacre in American history). Mankind’s history is full of genocide. People in today’s democracies and republics have more individual rights than our ancestors could have imagined 300 years ago. The violent crime rate in the US has dropped by more than one half since the early 1990′s. Property crimes (burglary, automobile theft, etc.) have dropped by more than two thirds since the mid 1970′s.
Something must be going right.
When reports start coming out about the history of the VA Tech shooter, it is likely that people will discuss that he watched horror movies, or that he listened to Marilyn Manson, or that he played Grand Theft Auto. But I have a very difficult time believing that any of those things can cause something like that to happen. Nearly every person I know (and the people I know are pretty good people) does at least two of those three things, and none of them have murdered before. My generation and the one following me watch violent movies and play violent video games, but we are quite possibly the most docile generation yet. Just look at our asses.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, many people seemed to think that it was a sign of the end of the world, as it caused what is likely, apart from the tsunami in 2004, the most widespread devastation that most people have ever seen. Seen. That’s the problem. People have only witnessed the time period of their own lifetime, which maxes out around 100 years or so. On average, any given person’s experience is much less time than that. Also, Television has only been in common use since the 1950s. CNN and other 24 hour news stations have only existed since 1980. Cable television and satellite started coming into most homes in the late eighties. In short, this “see everything” phenomenon is something that is very very new. Our frame of reference is really only the past twenty years.
Yes, Katrina was a terrible disaster, although with a death toll of under 2,000 people, it barely made the list of the 50 most deadly cyclones of all time, and was certainly not the most deadly hurricane on American soil. And that’s just cyclones, other natural disasters dwarf Katrina to a historically insignificant event.
Considering our modern concept of civil rights, modern medicine, sanitation, low crime rates, scientific and cultural enlightenment, etc. I don’t think I would rather have lived in any other period in Earth’s history.
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