On the REAL causes of school shootings.
There’s been another school shooting, this time in Santa Barbara, and the culprit is an Aspie. We all know what’s coming: blaming autism for his actions. Which makes about as much sense as blaming someone’s actions on their being male, or on their preferring pistachio flavored ice cream.
We need to have a serious talk in the media about how wrong it is to blame mentally ill people for being violent, when it's almost always violence and ableism and bullying that causes people to snap in the first place, and that most people who snap do so internally and shut down or commit suicide, and only a very few will snap outwardly, which is true of all people, even neurotypicals. Push anyone hard enough and they will either implode or explode, and whether they're mentally ill or not has very little to do with which they will go with; and my guess is, that if being mentally ill affects that outcome at all, it will affect it more towards implosion than explosion.
All these school shootings are not a fucking coincidence, they are happening for a reason, and that reason is that our entire fucking society is broken and needs to be repaired or replaced. A broken society creates broken people. Even if mental illness or mental difference *did* somehow correlate to violence, the cause is the same: society. School is a fucking war zone these days, and was long before Columbine. School sucked when I was growing up, and it has gotten at least 10 times worse if I can believe all the things I've read, and I do. We overload our kids with so much homework - an activity that doesn't even do anything positive - that they break down into tears and get PTSD. Nothing is done about bullying, and that adds to the stress, and creates depression and climbing suicide rates. School is literally Hell these days, and we wonder why our kids are suffering. The system is broken, if it ever worked in the first place, and needs to be replaced, because I believe it is beyond repair. And we can go a long way towards fixing those problems by taxing the rich, giving more money to our schools, and replacing the broken school system with a better one. We can go even further along the road of peace by removing the stressors that cause violence, by making sure everyone has enough food and water, has dependable shelter, and people don't have to work themselves to death just to survive. Do that, and crime and violence will plummet like a stone through air.
These issues, after all, do not exist in bubbles apart from each other. Taxes affect education, education affects mental health and stress levels, basic survival affect stress levels of kids and parents alike, high stress in adults leads towards a heightened chance of domestic abuse which causes more stress for the kids, and heightened stress levels that never really let down will cause a certain percentage of all kids, whether neurotypical or not, to become violent. It's basic "fight or flight." And since the adult world is little better in some ways and worse than others, some people just feel there is no fleeing, and that fighting is the only option. Fix the tax system by taxing the rich and punishing those who evade taxes, combined with coming up with a newer and better education system, will go a LONG way towards slashing the rate of violence.
In the mean time, blaming mental illness on the violence without looking at the real causes of the violence is just as effective toward solving the violence crisis as Republican denial of climate change is going to solve that crisis.
The world is changing, and we don't need mindless manufacturing worker drones anymore; we need intelligent minds to invent ways for us to abandoned short-sighted capitalism and move towards a future where everyone can be free of the stress of not having enough food or shelter and clothes, and can focus instead on chasing their dreams and contributing in meaningful ways to society. We have the technology already to provide more than enough energy, food, and shelter to everyone on the planet several times over. The only thing keeping us back is the greedy capitalist system and the even greedier, short-sighted fools who benefit from this system. And if we don't start acting soon, we will self-destruct our entire species, whether by environmental catastrophe, increasing outbreaks of violence, or both.
So please, let's stop blaming the victims of the system and start placing the blame in the hands of the system victimizing them, and the more-real hands of the people whose profit and greed makes them the real victimizers.
This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1238798.html
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