Yesterday, we discussed how various people have used the massacre in Connecticut to call for everything from gun control to new social programs and prayer in school. Now, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), a long advocate for censoring music and speech, added his own take: crackdown on violent video games. Lieberman described Adam Lanza of having a “hypnotic involvement” with the games and called on Congress to get involved.
Of course, it was not Lanza history of mental illness. Lieberman’s focus is on the games he played — the same games played by hundreds of millions of kids and adults who do not run to their local school to mow down students. However, Lieberman insists that “[v]ery often these young men have an almost hypnotic involvement in some form of violence in our entertainment culture – particularly violent video games. . . And then they obtain guns and become not just troubled young men but mass murderers.”
The basis for his concern with regard to Lanza? “Rumors” that he played the games. It was enough however to go to the floor of the Senate to call for yet another area of government regulation of speech and association.
Lieberman recognizes that the games seem to leave a surprising number of people in a non-murderous state, but that is just a fortunate side note: “Thank God, not all of them become murderers, but some of them do and we have to ask why.” I prefer to ask why we are talking about video games instead of the history of mental illness demonstrated by Lanza. And that is not even a rumor.
What everybody said.
puzzling 1, December 18, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Many of these games are highly sophisticated and provide tactical skills that are practiced in very realistic, violent simulation. That’s why our military uses them.
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That is why “our” military fosters, promotes, and finances them.
What nal said.
A professor in Rhode Island has tweeted that anyone who suggests teachers ought to be armed, should be murdered. The Rude Pundit snagged a screenshot of the tweet. The professor’s Twitter account has been disabled. He got a visit from the police–no surprise there. There are crazies on all sides of this debate.
http://twitchy.com/2012/12/18/university-of-rhode-island-professors-retweet-murder-anyone-who-thinks-teachers-should-be-armed/
Many of these games are highly sophisticated and provide tactical skills that are practiced in very realistic, violent simulation. That’s why our military uses them.
Hey Jim, Eric! With respect, do your views that “it’s the medication!” and “it’s the desensitization to violence” mean you think we ought not impose serious regulation of the guns, clips and ammo involved? Thought so.
Published on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 by Common Dreams
The Only Antidote to More Newtowns
by Robert Freeman
We can be horrified at the Newtown massacre. We can be outraged. We can be indignant. But we can no longer honestly be surprised.
The shootings in Connecticut are of the same ilk as the ones in Aurora, Portland, Virginia Tech, Columbine, and all the rest: a young man full of anger, weaponed up, with few connections, and nothing but despair in his heart.
Until we start doing something differently with our young people, the only thing we can expect is more of the same.
I am a high school teacher. I don’t know the pathologies of the shooter(s) or why they turned into mass murder. I do know something about young people, and what we might do to lessen this sickening epidemic.
First, let’s be honest about one thing: our culture is utterly saturated in violence. It is everywhere, from our endless wars to the professional sports teams we root for to the cop shows we watch to the blockbuster movies we flock to. Short of living in a cave, it is impossible to escape. Especially for young men.
Our boys live on video games where the hero is always the guy who can wreak the most havoc, inflict the most damage, expend the most rounds, kill the most bad guys. And despite all of our pious posturing, that is not likely to change.
Nor are we likely to change the easy access to guns that make these mass murders possible. We allow corporate money in the hands of the NRA to “terminate” the careers of politicians who even hint at gun control. Not even the near-murder of a Congresswoman seems to have given a spine to the politicians.
What we do have the power to change, however, is the culture in our schools where our young people learn the social sense of themselves. And the direction we’re going there is not reassuring.
Since the start of the Great Recession, 23 states have cut their spending on education. Most others have increased class sizes, cut counselors, reduced or eliminated arts and music classes, and dumbed down curriculum in order to teach to the tests. It is the exact opposite of what we would do if we were trying to create nurturing places for young people.
Worse, the charter movement that the Obama administration has backed with its deceptively named “Race to the Top” initiative aims to turn schools into profit making enterprises. The big charter companies want a piece of the $750 billion we spend each year on public education in the U.S.
But the only way they can make money is by cutting salaries (the big expense in education) and pushing standardized, rote curriculum. You cut salaries by firing mature, seasoned teachers and hiring young, inexperienced, uncredentialed ones. You dumb down the curriculum by having all teachers teach the same thing on the same day in the same way, regardless of the needs of the students. Doesn’t one size fit all?
Again, it is the exact opposite of what you would do if you valued students over profits. But hey, this is America. The Prime Directive is, “I’m getting mine, screw you.” There is nothing that cannot be debauched, nothing that cannot be made cheaper in pursuit of profit and cutting social services.
The irony is that schools are probably the only institution in America from which we can mount a defense against the degrading dehumanization ladled up by the media. We need to create cultures in our schools where students learn not just the “Three R’s” but the “Three B’s” as well: Being, Belonging, and Becoming. Done well, these can help form an antidote to the meaninglessness, mayhem, and murder that, more and more, seem to be our destiny.
What does this kind of culture look like?
A sense of Being comes when we honor every single individual in our schools, every child among us. This is not a cheezy ritual of “student of the month,” but a deeply rooted respect for the uniqueness and dignity of each human being. It is only conveyed one person at a time, uniquely to each student, and only from someone a child respects.
Those who want to replace seasoned teachers with low-cost room monitors, or dish out one-size-fits-all curriculum, send a powerful message to young people: you are not valued. You are a future factor of production, a product on an assembly line, that should be docile and obedient. And the students know this. They may not be able to articulate it as such, but they know. And the contempt reverberates for the rest of their lives.
Then, a sense of Belonging comes when the student reciprocates the esteem his school has shown him in Being. He finds community—connections—in something bigger than himself, something that can act as a ballast when a life starts to wobble out of control. This is the ancient practice of binding the child to his community by investing in the child the community’s hopes and aspirations. It is dignifying the child with the profound truth that she holds the community’s future in her hands, so we need to be sure they are steady, compassionate, resilient, and wise.
The African Bantu expression says it all: “Even the greatest waterfall starts with a single drop of water.” In a truly healthy society there are no free-floating individuals. Each is tethered to one another in a dense lattice of connections, shared values, shared visions, and shared aspirations. Rather than, “I’m getting mine, screw you,” the essential ethic is, “We’re all in this together.” It is not an accident that all of the shooters are loners. Neither should it be left to accident to ensure that every student is connected to something greater than themselves.
Finally, there is Becoming. The greatest longing of every young person is to become a bigger person. Not physically, but in terms of their capacity to move in the world. They want to be competent, effective, respected. Don’t we all? But these traits are not endowed by naming them. Rather, they are imbued, inculcated, cultivated, over years of schooling, by providing students the means to prove to themselves that they are, indeed, worthy of the competence and the respect that they all so deeply long for.
Every lesson, in every subject, is an opportunity for the student to demonstrate mastery—of himself. And when this capacity for self-mastery catches, the subject matter comes along for free. The students get far more energized showing themselves who they can be than they do showing their teachers what they know. And until the students can do that—show themselves the bigger Self they all long to be—everything else is just busy work and a pat on the head.
Close-knit communities used to perform these essential functions of cultivating social maturity in their young people. But we’ve lost that capacity for stewardship of our most important asset. We have surrendered it for the fool’s gold of a metastic individualism, a predatory nationalism, the fruitless search for meaning in money, the vapid titillation of an entertainment society, the shallow idols of a celebrity culture.
And the only place where we can possibly reclaim it is in our schools.
Our choices here are really quite stark. We can rail at the insanity of it all, but that changes nothing. We can break our picks on the impregnable rocks of coin-operated media and political cultures. Or we can take immediate, effective action in every classroom, every school, every neighborhood in the country, creating the cultures that build bigger people, and the people who can bring forth a better world.
And no one should have any illusions that this will be easy. There are no “just add water” recipes for how to create a culture that shows children they are esteemed. If there were, it wouldn’t be such a prized cultural possession. We can only know this: a culture that cannot, will not, provide for the deep nurturing of its young is doomed. That is where we’re headed.
The great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote once, “The future comes to us, and enters into us, in order to change itself, through us.” The future that we want to become, the one we are so panicked to see slipping away from us, is calling us. Can we possibly have the ears to hear? Can we possibly find the courage to act?
© 2012 Common Dreams
I would go Holy Joe one better. The ‘problem’ is not addiction to violent computer games only, it’s addiction to computers. And THAT, my dear, is a problem of inadequate parenting, not government underregulating speech.
I couldn’t agree more with Jim and the Senator. I strongly believe that the availability of guns is not the issue – nor will gun control fix the issue. The issue is the desensitization to violence that starts very early – because our entertainment – games, movies, television are all horrifically violent these days.
With video games like “Grand Theft Auto” and movies like “Saw” — where horror and depravity in graphic detail abound, how can we expect anything different?
Hey! Don’t look at guns. Look over there! Video games.
What a boob. Let’s also regulate shadows. Sometimes people get scared of them as well.
jim2,
Priorities is my guess. They first won’t to know if he had other buddies on the net with similar ideas. He trashed his PC, obviously for a purpose.
But, they may be doing what you suggest also. Who knows. A pertinent question, with a view to the widespread drug use we have.
I am very conflicted on this issue of censorship of violent video games. On the one hand, decades of research have shown that viewing of violence on television and in movies has a de-sensitizing effect – that violence is more acceptable as a quick way to handle a problem, especially for children and the emotionally-vulnerable, in a culture that does not teach problem-solving skills and anger/impulsivity management. On the other hand, I don’t want laws to determine if anything creative is “too violent.” My wish would be that the culture would decide that it has had enough of violence in any such form as videos etc. and individually and collectively make it unavailable by no longer purchasing it and making it known that such content-viewing is considered socially unacceptable.
He is far more to blame as a warmongering idiot in government than video games could ever be.
The straw that breaks the camel’s back however also applies.
All members of culture are in this together for better or for worse.
Lieberman represents the worst of Americana.
Although nature confirms MikeS affirmation that rushing a gunman is appropriate activity, this must be a last resort tactic. With no disrespect, I ask are we training Iranian Guards suicide troops in the war with Irak?
Colonies of birds will exemplify. They do not sit quietly waiting to be picked by the carnivorous bird. At the first alarm signal, they fly and create a pandemonium which makes it harder to select and capture a prey.
Such suggestions as hers put the responsibility on the children, not where is belongs.
I would like to know if this lanza fellow was on prescibed medication. I believe this knowledge will turn out to be pertinent and have yet to see this addressed in the media. Why is that?
Police fought for hours yesterday to control junior college students, who collected to protest “hanging out girls” on the internet. Accusations of whore, slut, round-heel were accompanied by pictures of the accused girls.
The Junior College is closed today. 24 were arrested although no charges have been filed. The parents were asked to fetch their kids.
Maybe it is the sixties all over again. Happened in Swedens second city, Gothenborg.
Restraining gun use seems not to have crossed Lieberman’s mind.
First of a long list of such congressional utterances.
He hauls up the flag to see who will salute and be misled AGAIN.
Guns quell free speech. Time to say: enough!
To paraphrase an ancient King of England: Will anybody rid us of Joe Lieberman rating attention?
Then I will couple this gem :
Newsweek’s Megan McArdle Calls For Children To Be Trained To Run At Active Shooters
Blog ››› 4 hours and 40 minutes ago ››› JOHN WHITEHOUSE
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/12/18/newsweeks-megan-mcardle-calls-for-children-to-b/191889
Just thought I would give a real time update at my grandsons Hugh School
Police are at Montclair High School where students are being evacuated because of a bomb threat referencing the high school. According to Principal James Earle, a tweet that mentioned blowing up the high school was the reason for the evacuation. The tweet came out of discussion regarding rivalry between Bloomfield and Montclair. The tweet was brought to the attention of the school by a student and authorities were notified.
Montclair High School sent this message at 2:30 p.m.
Montclair High School has just announced a Non Fire Emergency Evacuation for both buildings of the high school. The evacuation was ordered by the Montclair Police Department and school officials after a threat against the school was discovered in a twitter message. An active investigation is in progress. Staff and students will remain outside in safe areas until the end of the school day or the all clear signal is given.
Students are now being evacuated at Montclair High School because of the bomb threat, first reported by Breaking News Network:’