On Hatred: The Economic Argument

The whole US Government should file into the nearest theatre in Washington DC, and someone should play for them a cartoon that explains the economical situation of America better than any other. Duck Tales, specifically, this episode about inflation. Essentially, the more money is made, the less it's worth, due to supply and demand.  For instance, when Titanic came out on VHS, so many copies were made that Walmart couldn't give them away. They had so many, and so their worth went down. Another example... say you had one coffee cup. You couldn't get another one. How careful would you be with that coffee cup? It would be like gold to you, and the same example would apply to toys children had in years gone by.  Children had one doll, one car, one basketball, and if they got damaged or ruined, there just wasn't enough money to go out and buy another (and especially no credit cards by the handfuls) People were much more careful  about the things they had. Now, you break the coffee cup, you go to Walmart and buy one for $5.00, and you think nothing of it.  For that coffee cup is basically worthless.

Now, to return to the idea of evil, of the hatred that runs through people's veins like a germ.  That hatred must be exercised in different ways. One obvious, and relatively safe way, is through the playing of first-person shooter video games. My brother is really good at it, and I thought the game Carmageddon II was amazing, as you got to run over people with your car as you demolished other vehicles. And if you died or crashed, you just "respawned" in your home base. Just 100 coins, and you get a new life, to put it simply. The value of those lives is diminished as it matters little how many times you get killed.  The situation changes when there's something to be lost when death occurs, in video games, that is. If there are no consequences, then death matters very little.

Outside, in the real world, we experience the same thing.  I call it "population inflation," the idea that, as our population grows, the value of each individual life becomes less. You can see it everywhere. In the south side of Chicago, children are murdered daily, and you hear very little about it outside of the normal body count on the news. You've seen the videos where someone lays bleeding on the sidewalk, and pedestrians just walk around him or her, unwilling to help or to get involved. The value of that life just isn't worth them taking time out of their day. This is the value of human life now. We come a dime a dozen, and when it's time to throw the dead, useless bodies out of the hospice and welcome a new set of elderly in, why, that's the way things go. Squeeze out the last bits of money available, and move on.  Charge them for the Big Mac, the weight loss program, the Cardiologist bill, the increased health insurance premiums, and then be done with them, ready for a new generation to run through the mill.  And there are countless other examples, but those are for other blogs, other rants.

The prime example comes from Newtown, Connecticut  The shooter walks into Sandy Hook Elementary and guns down an entire class of Kindergartners  and then himself.  I would really like to know what he thought was going to happen to those children. Would they simply "respawn" at their houses, to appear the next day at school? Would the shooter and his mom do the same thing? What was the value of each child's life as he took them away? Nothing. He didn't even hold his own life of any value, as, I guess, he thought he would simply appear someplace else, ready to start the next day.

Likewise, the Radical Islamic Terrorists that have plagued the world recently (and let's be honest, they've existed for centuries, but now they have the weapons and we have the 24 hour news broadcasts to make each of them known. Postman: "The Medium is the Message.") have the same view of life as the Newtown shooter did. To them, Islam has taught them that all life outside of Islam is worthless, and people are to be turned or destroyed. Further, Jihad makes suicide a rewarding act, that in the next world, there will be riches for ending their lives after killing Christians (or any other "infidels." The Radical Islam sect encourages the spread of hate, the devaluing of human life, like no other religion on Earth. We have to see this, and endeavor to eradicate that hate anywhere we see it, online, in our prison system, or in the people that we love.