Cut short
Very early this morning, almost immediately after I finished my previous entry, I turned on the news and learned that a young man, a co-work and former classmate of my children, was shot and killed sometime after midnight. It makes me sad not only because I knew this young man, or that I thought that he was nice, even though all of that is true. I’m really sad that it seems to me that young people have been desensitized to the value of human life. As I was talking to my son about this i reminded him how I would not let him play the mortal kombat video game with the blood code. I just thought it was a terrible idea to have kids playing a karate game and every time one of the characters hit or kicked the other blood would fly. The video game of that day and this day are vastly different. The video games are more realistic as well as the carnage and blood that goes along with them. I had to do a project for my psychopathology class a couple of semesters ago, and I did it on the social learning theory and violence in our society. The social learning theory, formulated by Bandura holds that aggression is reinforced by family, the media and environment. It’s a matter of nurture versus nature. This is what we are seeing in our society now. An increase in the number of violent crimes. With many of our young people now, along with the violence in movies and video games, they have been exposed to graphic images of war on the daily news. As a result they experience gradient desensitization. Gradient desensitization is a behavior modification technique in which the subject is exposed to a stimulus that would normally cause an adverse reaction beginning at low levels and increasing until there is not reaction at all. I believe that there is another element coupled with this that is causing young people to leave this world at an alarming rate. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10 NIV). The enemy desires to steal our future. What better way to steal our future than by destroying our children? The bad part about it is that we all seem to be desensitized to the horrible tragedy unless it affects us directly. I remember last december, another young man who I knew was murdered while he was at his job. He was only 19. What will it take for us, as a society to really be concerned? While we have one generation that is living longer than ever, we have another generation that has a shorter life span than their great grand parents. This is more than politics, it’s more than religion, it’s life.
diva2de 