Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on in this world

Today's headlines:

Toddler Stabbed in Back, Dad Hunted

Ohio 13-Year-Old Charged With 128 Felonies

Girl Finds (her own) Dog's Head in Gift-Wrapped Box

Granny Accused of Pimping Grandkids Online

'I Decapitated With My Hand American Jew, Daniel Pearl'

Man pulls his ex-girlfriend into elevator, sets off bomb

Cops Search Trailer in Hunt for Georgia Boy


A day ago one of the headlines was a guy who beat his infant child.

I don't know what's happening in this country. People are doing increasingly evil things with alarming frequency. I can't stand reading about babies getting stabbed and beaten and thrown from cars. Has the whole world gone Boulder, or is Boulder just an example of the whole world?

 

I don't think there is 1 answer,

however I think that symptoms of lawlessness are all around us. The crimes get more horrific or even unspeakable by the day. We have too much time on our hands and we have too much of everything in this country. We are a society of throw away items. People's personal space isn't respected as it once was. People are angry at everything or quick to anger for the smallest slight or glance. And gangs! I live in a smallish community that was for a time in years gone by the ideal community to raise a family. 4th of July parades, front porches with families sharing homemade ice cream and waving the American Flag. Norman Rockwell if you will. Then gradually we became a bedroom community for the Silicon Valley computer industry. That means that many homeowners aren't even here for around 10 or 12 hours a day because they are at work out of the area. The larger cities around us here have done some excellant work on gang prevention so the gangs have moved out of the larger cities and come here to where I live. With empty houses (because the famlies are all at work out the area) the robbery/burgleries have increased. Slum areas have increased because greedy landlords are sucking the life out of tenants and not repairing a house when the repairs are small. These are all symptoms I think of a careless society or a throwaway society. If something doesn't work throw it away and get a new one. Even people!!!!! Even dogs and cats!!!!!!! WE see it everywhere. Marriages are a joke esp with the "Hollywood" type folks. What's a lifetime committment to them? 3 months maybe then throw that one away and take a new one for another 3-4 months and so on and so forth. Then locals seem to imatate that same behavior as a standard!?

Wow what got me started on all of that? Well goodness. Thanks for listening.

 

All we can do is vent, zoo. We live in a world of entitlement. Kids have grown up with a sense of entitlement, and those kids have become adults with a sense of entitlement. There's too much violence, too much permissiveness, too much leniency on criminals, and not enough parental control.

I'm sick of it all.

 

What you are experiencing is an increase in information about these crimes, and not necessarily the amount of crimes themselves. Someone throws a child out a car window? That seems outrageous, until you compare it with things like "Roman man leaves child exposed on hillside to die," or "Soldiers go from house to house, killing all firstborn male children." In past years, you were protected from knowing how much crime was going on because your local newspaper and TV news could never keep up with all that was happening even two cities over, let alone across the whole of just your state. Now, your news is global and you can get as much of it as you want. You turned on your computer and looked for those headlines, or your local news writers turned on their computers and looked for those headlines, and there is no more effort now in getting a story about a child finding a dog's head in a box as there is in finding out that little Brianna down the street won the Sunburst pageant. Crime news used to be hard to find, and now it is easy. It really is as simple as that.

 

For perspective, pick up some of the books by Luc Sante. You can learn much about how, in the 1800's, children in New York City formed their own saloons stocked with their own child prostitutes. I know that after I read "Low Life," I came to realize that, relative to much of history, we have it pretty good these days. If things had stayed as they used to be, I dare say most of us posters would never have lived as long as we have.

 

I know you're right, WhyNut, but it makes me wish I didn't live in the new and improved world. I guess my problem is that I lived in a time when people were actually respectful and kind to each other - at least in my world. Kids did have more respect then - that's a fact. It was a world before the rampant drug abuse that exists now - a world before the blatant sexualization of young teenagers.

The crimes may have been occurring then, but for me, it really was a better world, then. Apparently, that's not true world-wide, though.

 

Yes, with cable news came the hunt for gore 24/7 (and no, I don't mean Al Gore!). Tiananmen Square was, I think, the first violent foreign atrocity that was broadcast real-time around the world, and cable network news was born from that event.

There really isn't enough news to keep all the networks going 24/7, so they search for it and throw it up in our faces.

But that's not all of it, it's a licentious world, more so than in previous times. When everything is relative and there is no right and wrong, only what feels right to ME, then life is cheap and the moral structure decays.

I think Europe is this way and has been for years. We as a country just have more resources at hand, so we look more like Rome in decline. And our leaders are fiddling...while we burn... :help:

 

I live in a small college town in western Nebraska. It used to be that the only "crimes" that happened here were speeding and the like, but recently the high school was broken into and vandalized, numerous homes were burglarized (some homes were even robbed at gunpoint), a woman's boyfriend (a policeman) killed her baby, and the body of an assistant college professor who'd disappeared in December was found outside of town a few days ago, and his death is being investigated as a possible homicide. Oh, I almost forgot... a few months ago, a meth lab was discovered in a little house right off the college campus.

Times, they are a-changing, and not always for the better.

 

Meth is actually the source of many of these horrific crimes. What a tool the Devil has in that concoction...

 

Heymom, you're probably too young to have seen the assassination of the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, Oswald, by Jack Ruby. That was actually a LIVE BROADCAST on the news. I remember because I heard my father hollar. He was watching Oswald being moved from the jail where he was being held, with a crowd of LE surrounding Oswald, moving through a basement car park in Texas, and BAM! There was Jack Ruby, shooting Oswald. It was shocking then, and it's shocking now when you think about it being a live broadcast of an assassination.

Then there was the South Vietnamese (our ally) army officer who shot a captured North Vietnamese (enemy) soldier in the head POINT BLANK, executing him right there for all the world to see on camera. That is one of the more infamous news broadcasts as well. Lots of grim stuff came out of the Vietnam War on the news. That's when the media first had the means to take camera crews with them into the war zone willy nilly.

But it is hard to take, learning how really depraved the human race is, when you start getting the big picture. Here's another one: a 6 year old child's body was found today, after days of searching here in Georgia. He was apparently murdered by some moron who has a record of sex crimes, and whose parents and another man helped cover up the murder:
http://news.aol.com/topnews/article...d/20070315170009990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

I'm losing my compassion. I lost my religion long ago. If I lose hope, I don't know where to turn. Maybe I'll just turn the TV off and quit reading the news. Because Evil is just too big. One thing I've learned from the internet: there are more stupid, ignorant, and insidiously deceptive people on this planet who will gladly and gleefully do mean and awful things than I ever wanted to know about.

 

I was in Kindergarten when JFK was killed. My mother and all the adults around me were distraught, Mother particularly because she was a devout Catholic. I remember the Vietnam War coverage, too. But the cable news channels were baptized, if you will, in the blood of Tiananmen Square.

God doesn't want us to lose hope. If we do, it's the Enemy who is standing right next to us. Hope is God's gift to us and we shouldn't let evil destroy it.

 

What's disturbing to me is that most people don't blink an eye anymore about the headlines you posted.

Few care enough to be shocked, it's simply something entertaining to read with their morning coffee. Britney shaving her head is deemed more important than what's really going on..

Apathy is rampant. So please don't stop caring.

 

Amber, I am going to respectfully disagree. I think most people feel overwhelmed with all of the bad news over the radio, TV, and internet, and in the paper. I think we feel helpless at times to affect any of it, so we turn off inside, sort of get numb to it if we can. We are bombarded with horror every minute of the day, if we choose to tune in, and when not tuned in to the horror, we can plug ourselves into any other appliance like an iPod, so we don't have to actually think about our lives and our purpose here on Earth.

I think most people actually care too much, and when you can't do anything to help, you seem as if you don't care at all. Honestly, other than feel terrible, what can I do to help the family of that little boy in Georgia? Nothing. I can pray for them, which I do for anyone and everyone I can think of, including Bad People. They deserve God's mercy as much as I do, which is to say, not at all. So that is why I pray.

I limit my exposure to the television. It really isn't healthy for my soul. I try to live my life so as to increase the good in the world. I think most people are good inside and care more than they can stand to.

JMO.

 

I can't argue with anything you said, it's all true. I'm just having a bad week so I'm projecting

 

My family and I discussed this very thing tonight. The headlines of the past few days have been so disturbing. We discussed the Jessica Lunsford trial, the missing child Christopher Barrios who was a victim to an entire family! The mother, father and adult child were involved with the child's disappearance and death. WTF??

And this kid who's committed 1000 crimes....why are young people so violent.
Why are there so many unsupervised and unaccounted for sexual predators?

Why are violent teens and young adults attacking the elderly???

There seems to be little regard for life. It's so very, very sad.