On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> Mike Ballard writes:
>
>> I think Moore puts his finger on the answer when he
>> hints that Canadians have health care and a safety net
>> which they can more or less depend on.
>
> Talk about a crackpot theory. You're saying that because 47 MILLION
> USers don't have health care, fewer than the number of fingers you have
> of them shoot up a school or a church now and again?
>
> You have some evidence that tragedies like Columbine are systemic
> problems? Let's see it.
Okay, let's go at it the other way around: assume it's just expression of human nature for people to go batshit sometimes and kill lots of people. Then we should see these school shootings in about equal frequency in all industrialized societies with mandatory schooling.
We don't; thus there must be something about the social relations and social structures in our society that facilitate this kind of deviant behavior. Is it a meagre safety net, compared to other industrialized nations, as Mike argues? That's one possibility, and it's not as goofy as Jordan argues. To the extent that our miserly government support for the poor reinforces a "screw-you-I've-got-mine" worldview, it undermines community and concern for others. In short, naive individualism = weak social fabric = deviant behavior. (--Or it could be any combination of the thousands of other ways the U. S. varies from other industrialized nations!)
Miles