Progress on the Pimsleur stuff: negligible. Finished up the lesson that I was having trouble with the other day. Haven't started a new one because my girlfriend is back in town and because I'm extraordinarily busy.
iPhone App: just finished a rough first alpha. And I mean VERY rough. Like, only the bare minimum of stuff is finished to even call it an alpha release. I'm still adding features and making things significantly prettier. Lots of work to do!
Thoughts:
I've been thinking about the Aurora, Arizona shootings a lot recently. Naturally, you've all heard the story of a grad school dropout that opened fire at the midnight premiere of the new "Batman" movie, killing 12 and wounding 50+. And I think that there are a lot of things to blame for the tragedy. First and foremost, the mental health system in this country is abysmal. People have no safety net anymore for if something goes wrong in their heads. Folks, mental illness is real (I suffer from mild ADD and OCD, and I used to be severely depressed/manic), and yet there is a huge swath of our country that not only refuses to acknowledge its existence, but alienates those that suffer from these often debilitating conditions. Had there been a public safety net in place that could help recognize and treat people with serious mental disturbances, like the young man who perpetrated the Arizona shootings, things might have been different. He might have found help; he might have found comfort. HE MIGHT HAVE FOUND UNDERSTANDING. By my totally unscientific, but nevertheless telling, observation throughout my years as a high school and college student have shown me this: every person that I've ever known to have a breakdown or, to use the more common term, "snap", has only ever really been missing one thing, and that is the understanding of others.
I used to have a very good friend that ended up dropping out of my high school and going to the local public school, officially because he had a serious alcohol problem. But it wasn't really the alcoholism that caused him to drop out. It was the loneliness and paranoia he felt on a day-to-day basis that forced him to drop out. He had very few friends, and fewer acquaintances. He didn't talk to people mostly because they thought he was "weird" or "nerdy". When I became friends with him, he had hit rock bottom. Within a month, he went from failing all his classes to passing nearly all of them. He stopped drinking so much and even found a few more friends. But it wasn't enough. He had failed two classes the semester before and was set to fail a third this semester and by school policy was forced to leave. I wonder nearly every day, if I had been there for him even a few weeks earlier, would he have been able to save his grades? Would he have recovered and come back to reality and gained acceptance from others? I don't know. I don't even think I could have done it alone. But I could have helped more.
The other thing that has been really bugging me is the people that try to defend public ownership of AR-15s and other incredibly powerful weaponry. I found a great article from Jason Alexander about this problem, and he makes some excellent points: first of all, it's been well documented that the ability to buy assault weapons in this country is an absolutely terrible idea. How many more shootings in which innocent children and young adults die will it take for people to realize how stupid it is for people to own assault weapons? We've had at least five in the last 15 years that I can remember: the Columbine shootings in 1999 (13 dead), the Virginia Tech massacre (2007 I believe, 32 dead), the Fort Hood massacre (2009, 9 dead), the shooting in Arizona that nearly killed Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (2011, 6 dead) and now this Aurora shooting (2012, 12 dead). So, that's...72 well-publicized shooting massacre deaths in 15 years. I don't know about you, but that's just disgusting.
I'm not saying people should stop having guns, because that's never going to happen. But could we as a country and as a people stop our bass-ackwards love affair with unnecessarily big guns and get a real hobby? I'm just saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment