They Are Shooting The Sheriff, The Deputy, The Other Students And Themselves

 

I remember years ago the idea came about that we would not need terrorists to terrorize us. This idea started before nine eleven and it certainly solidified itself after this tragic date. For a little while there it seemed that the adults anxiety level was high enough for them to go over the edge. I remember the many stories of the man, woman or couple that lost it and killed their family or held people hostage or some other bizarre behavior that we usually cannot figure out because they wind up offing themselves. To a smaller degree the adults are still at it.

 

Now it’s the kids. Why have the kids turned terrorists?

 

In 1962 MIT brains came up with Spacewar, the first video game and although crude and prehistoric, compared with today’s virtually real games, violent they still were. The whole point was to shoot down another ship, and then you got points. If the first video game was about planting trees in a decimated area of the Amazon’s rainforest and you got points for every sampling that grew…. YAWN!

 

For the last two decades the video games have such purposeful point accumulation systems like how many cops and whores can you kill. Now that seems like perfectly safe and sane entertainment right? Even the parents that also enjoy these games show the side effect of the games when they have brawls and catfights with each other over who snatched up the last game box at the retailer.

 

And we don’t expect the kids to become affected?

 

There is a debate between Hollywood and TV producers who face the dilemma of how to depict violence without exploiting it. Give me a killin’ break! It’s simple, you selfish, greedy, I’ll-do-anything-for-ratings-and-box-office-revenue-executives: DON’T show it! It is no secret that what the mind can craft up on its own can be far more gruesome or terrifying than what TV and Hollywood can dramatize through computer animation and today’s seemingly real blood and guts.

 

The first Halloween movie was the blockbuster hit that it was because in many scenes we knew exactly what was about to happen but we didn’t necessarily have to see it drop by bloody drop. Some lunatic psycho was going to chop up a teenager right after he and she finished smoking reefer and began to have sex. The original Halloween hardly showed the gory violence that its successors showed. Recently we’ve seen a rash of sadistically torturous flicks like Saw I, II, III, oh hell, I forget how many there are. I don’t need to point out how many movies have been recently released that have no real scary merit. They are merely a quick set up for nearly two hours of non-stop cutting, sawing, and shots of slow penetration of various objects into various parts of the body.

 

So should we be surprised that every day now there’s a shooting at a school? We were almost used to the killings right in our backyards involving American nuclear families and…boom! Now it’s a daily news sound bite at the nearby school. These kids are also medicated. The shooters all seem to be on a cocktail of ‘selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors,’ drugs like Prozac, Zoloft and Wellbutrin. I’ve noticed that they also seem to be taking Ambien.  Maybe Ambien is the sleep medication du jour and therefore more people seem to be taking it, but its side effects are clearly posted everywhere and some of the more scary ones are: temporary amnesia, drug dependence, aggressive behavior, confusion, agitation, depression and suicidal thoughts.

 

My favorite is suicidal thoughts. Suicidal thoughts are a side effect of just about every psychotropic medication available! Should we really be surprised that the kids have lost their equilibrium along with the rest of society? They have grown up in a world where one on one communication is unheard of. Instead, communication by every other cold and electronic means is the norm. Their social life is on the Internet and nowhere near the school, the playground or their neighborhood. The closest they get to a neighborhood is the mall where they can buy labels, junk food, and watch more violent movies while ingesting the junk.

 

Drugs are a necessary evil to combat a worse evil because every now and then an infection will not stop until the right drug kills it. However, I recently read that Nexium has been approved, by the FDA of course, for children aged one to eleven years of age for heartburn. A one year old, with heartburn? What’s in that mother’s breast milk? Or what’s in the infant formula? I overheard a triage nurse recently advise the parents of a toddler to stop feeding the cola since the child had been vomiting on an hourly basis.

 

I understand that there is hardly any art, music or physical education taught in the schools but we better figure out a way to teach young people a thing or two about biology. Not how to slice open a frog and look for eggs and declare; “I got the female!” But how biology, drugs and foods work inside the human body. And how foods can wind up acting just like drugs. Can we say sugar, aspartame and high fructose corn syrup? Oh, but wait, we don’t need to do that; the government and the FDA are looking out for all of us…right? We know the answer to that last bit of sarcasm, but the kids don’t know the difference. They grow up with their siblings being medicated my mommy and daddy. They see mom and dad medicating themselves and they see them using alcohol. I won’t even go into the drugs of the dark side.  

 

The kids are now desensitized to pain. They can’t feel anything! And you can’t say they didn’t warn us because we went through a decade where they purposefully burned, cut and mutilated themselves in front of their parents and peers to prove it. We also cannot put this responsibility on the parents, after all, they either must work more than one job to barely support the home or they are paid so much that there is the disconnect of the wealthy and intellectual that has a nanny for each DNA copy. Maybe someone will pay attention to the no child left behind idea and really pay attention to the kids. Some of the kids that warned us during the 80s by self-mutilation are now grown up and have their own kids, which they have also medicated because it’s all they’ve ever known.

 

Whew! I am so wound up from writing this I think I will take a Prozac to take off the anxiety, maybe swallow that with a martini and if I’m not feeling better in an hour, I might take a Cymbalta. If I’m still edgy I will need some sleep so I’ll take a Lunesta and go to bed since I have at least eight hours I can devote to sleep. And don’t worry, if I have a suicidal thought or think about chopping up my supervisor’s head, I will do what all the patient information booklets and commercials say. I will immediately call my doctor. Oh, but wait, my doctor never answers the phone. And the first thing the doctor’s recording tells you is “if this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. 911…we pay extra for that service now on so many levels don’t we?

  Ó 2008 Carlos A. Perez