- 5/25 - Star Wars in Concert
- 6/5 - Imogen Heap
- 6/18 - Dave Matthews (night one)
- 6/19 - Dave Matthews (night two)
- 7/11 - Jamie Cullum
- 7/17 - Modest Mouse
- 8/9 - Arcade Fire (w/ Spoon)
- 8/28 - Broken Social Scene, Built to Spill, etc. (Loufest music festival)
- 9/17 - Flaming Lips
- 11/7 - MGMT
So this has/will be a good concert year for me! I've wanted to see Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, and Flaming Lips for sometime now, and never seen them before. So I am psyched!!
On to the motivation for this post:
I just finished watching a special on E! called "Child killers - too young to kill" or something like that. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this. I realize that people are the summation of a lot of nature and nurture, and its naive to believe that we're all just acting on free-will. I think we are probably much less the product of our actions, and much more the product of our environment. Im sure that most of us would have *completely* different lives with just a few key things happening differently in our past. This of course flies in the face of the day-to-day experience, where we appear to be in control of ourselves. We're certainly never slow to take pride in our "accomplishments"-- which we expect everyone to recognize as our own blood, sweat, and tears-- something we do just by our own intelligence and foresight. Probably more often than not we're dumb animals that are just smart enough to *believe* we're smart... dangerous.
So given all of this, my humanity feels sorry for these kids. I am sorry that they wont be able to live full, rewarding lives. I would like to think that they can be "fixed" and realize my hope for myself (and everyone) of happiness and fulfillment.
On the other side, they are broken. By whatever means, some of their own choice, most the result of others' choices-- they arrived at a point in time in which they knowingly took someone elses life. They took that hope, happiness, and fulfillment from an innocent person, who had no choice in the matter. And for this, we punish murderers. I suspect that to get to a point, where you actually destroy another human, requires a severe defect in your brain. The brain is a funny thing, its not like a motor to a car, where you can just "replace a belt" or "clean the spark plugs". It's much more complicated, and thus requires much more subtle repair. In many cases, the defect is so entrenched that it might never be repaired. Not fair? sure its not fair. It's not fair for anyone involved, but it's reality.
There are a lot of people in the world, and I don't think we (individually, culturally, biologically, etc.) can "fix" everyone. Especially in the case of murderers, I don't know that we can ever fix them. I'm not even sure we should try. We have plenty of non-murderers that need help. Is this a lack of humanity and compassion on my part? Maybe. I think it's a realistic acceptance of the constraints of our world. In any case, it's a terrible, unfair situation for everyone.
The E! special was interesting. I found myself many times with my jaw dropping at some of the horrific, stupid, unnecessary things that these kids did for terrible reasons. True tragedy.
Sorry for the heavy stuff...
Steve
1 comment:
Sometimes it's an accident, but I doubt that's what the program was covering.
If it's a crime of passion, it's usually the result of an emotionally-broken person. That sort of "broken" can generally be fixed, and that's usually taken into consideration in sentencing (temporary insanity, etc.).
The other types of "broken", though, are much more dangerous.
There are the irrational - those who aren't operating under standard logic, sometimes because they can't (due to mental illness, for example). The only way to "fix" these is to get the individual to recognize the failure(s) in their chain of logic. That takes a lot of work and education and even then is not often possible.
The worst of the "broken", however, are those who actually aren't "broken" but merely atypical: those with a morality significantly enough different from the norm that murder isn't necessarily bad. This class includes people who kill "for the greater good", people who do it for enjoyment or personal benefit, and people who do it for simple expediency. You can't "fix" these people: most of the problem is genetic, not learned, and even if you can impose a new morality, there's no guarantee it'll "stick" in the long term.
There are probably other cases as well, but I suspect most of what you saw were instances of passion and amorality. Usually it's the amoral murders that really frighten people, simply because the average human can't understand - literally, cannot comprehend because their brains don't work that way - the thought process that goes into it.
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