I was horrified, awestruck, dumbfounded. I was 20 years old and watching on T.V. as the unthinkable began to unfold for the families of the students at a high school in Colorado. A gunman had entered the high school and opened fire! This is the first I remember this ever happening, maybe it was dramatized by the news, maybe I have forgotten other incidents over the years, for whatever reason this one stuck with me. The name Columbine will always mean "school shooting" to me. It will always bring to my remembrance a feeling of disgust and of sadness. The original sadness for the students involved and the suffering families, and now the sadness of a nation under attack.
Maybe
not just a nation for such things are not limited to America. The most
innocent in any part of the world- the children are being attacked at a
place of vulnerability. Education is being attacked and the desire to
attend school to better your life, whether its primary school, or
secondary, you are no longer safe to do so. This would imply that you
once were safe to do so, this is not the case for everyone and it is not
as much the case as I once thought. After a quick internet search I landed on this page: A History of School Shootings in America. I will be the first person to be critical of wikipedia, and the validity of its information, so please feel free to correct any of the shootings posted in the link above. This post's focus is more on what is happening to bring about so many shootings since Columbine.
So what is happening? Lets take a look...
I did a search on You Tube for children's cartoons. I clicked on the first one that came up. It is a 54 minute compilation of Disney cartoons. I only watched the first 5 mintues and I had what I needed to prove my point. Here is a link to chip n' dale on You Tube. Let's look at what is taught in the short 5 minute cartoon of Donald Duck and Chip n' Dale. The first thing I noticed was entitlement. Donald Duck steals a bundle of nuts from the chipmunks and then is immediately angry when they take them back. He is entitled to those nuts!! He rightfully stole them!! Then Chip n' Dale teach the same concept of entitlement when Santa shows up and offers a large nut to one and a small nut to the other, a fight promptly ensues between the 2 of them over the bigger gift. They both feel entitled to something that was suppose to be a gift, suppose to make them happy on Christmas. Christmas, a day of love, a day to celebrate our Lord and Savior, and they spend it bickering over a present from Santa. Then as if entitlement weren't enough, they make the fight between the 2 chipmunks and Donald Duck bigger and better, with a full on war scene! This scene is complete with barricades, rapid gun fire, canon fire, and an ambulance.
So here in the first 5 minutes of this cartoon children are being taught entitlement, violence in order to get back what you stole, and that war and/or fighting is ok, even funny. Do you see any connection between this and the violence we see in our culture today?
Chip n' Dale is an old cartoon. The cartoons that are being created today are even worse. They teach children that they should whine about things like school, and undermine authority figures. The very places children should turn when they need help, they are being taught not to trust. Do you see any connections between this and things like teenagers being emotionally unstable? Parents and teachers are not portrayed as people that can be trusted. So who do children have to rely on? When a child feels like they have no one, that is recipe for problems down the road, big problems. Problems that can take a life time to over come.
