It's called alienation. In our culture, the fetishization of commodities and material wealth has given our society a very impersonal, dog-eat-dog attitude. This, combined with the traditional expectation that men are not to share their emotions, is a recipe for an atomized society, with people growing ever more distant from each other as they seek to get rid of their negative emotions through the media and the accumulation of material goods. Of course, these things don't bring true emotional fulfillment, so it's no wonder we've got angsty teens monstruous enough to slaughter classmates without feeling bad about it. They don't feel that they have purpose in their lives, or that they belong to a community that cares about them, or that the experience called life is so magnificent that to deprive others of it is the worst thing anybody can do.

It clearly cannot be drugs, or violent video games, or metal music, that drives teenage boys to such heinous acts, although many like to blame it on such things. Really, the cause must be a deep-seated psychological feeling of emptiness and alienation, and we have to ask what we can change about our society to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
Oneironaut Reviewed by Oneironaut on . What's with all the schoolchildren?!? Damn, I swear, everytime I log onto Yahoo mail there's ANOTHER blip about some school shooting. There have been 3 in the last 2 weeks for Christ's sake! What's going on here? I look today and now some Amish school in Pennsyvlania was shot up and 6 kids were killed. And I believe it was the 26th of September that we had another one in Colorado killing one girl and then the killer shot himself. Around the same time there was that old man who tried to pose as a high school student who Rating: 5