Why aren’t there more school shootings? Why aren’t kids mowing down other kids with bullets? The suburbs should run red with the blood of the innocent. Parents and teachers should lay dead in the streets. Kids should been killing everything within their sight with a bloodthirsty and psychopathic irreverence to the laws of the land. Only… they don’t.

For every copy of a Grand Theft Auto game sold, there should be a correspondent murder. After all, “These are the kind of things that are training our children. This is the vile stuff. The Grand Theft Auto games are cop-killing murder simulators.” – Gayle Ruzicka (GamePolitics)

Maybe the drive to murder those around you is not instantly turned on in children. Perhaps it takes time to develop. Some would have us believe that. “Yet countless independent studies confirm what most parents instinctively know to be true: repeated exposure to graphic sexual, violent and profanity-laced video games has a harmful and long-term effect on children…” That from the Parents Television Council President Tim Winter (GamePolitics)

Say I believed each of these men. I don’t. But let’s say I did. If I were to assume that exposure to graphic subject matter had a profound and permanent effect on children, what is to stop children from becoming homicidal over watching the news. There are certainly graphic depictions of violence there. Videos of war torn lands and explosions going off are often shown.

Taking a even further step back, let’s examine sports. Certainly they could be considered violent. Maybe not as graphic but certainly violent. Football for example is a game where a major part consists of using physical force to stop other players. I would consider that violent. Of course, then there is hockey. It is not at all uncommon to see fistfights and blood spilled there.

As a final step consider the imagination of children. Or, more accurately, the mythologies children build for themselves. How often is a young boy slaying a dragon or fighting in some epic battle? Am I to believe that children playing “Cowboys and Indians” don’t have those figures or units that are killed?

The sad truth is probably that we all have some spark of violence in us. Some act out such anger, channel such thoughts into constructive things. Like legislation. They turn their rage at an unjust world and worry over their children into walls. If they can only keep their little ones safe inside then they will never be affected by the evil lurking outside. Never mind the potential for evil that lurks in all souls. If only the walls will hold, all things will work out.

There is a lie told so many times that hardly any believe there is any truth in but it is still repeated to the young from the old. One Day, This Will Help You. This time of you gnashing your teeth and wringing your hair in frustration is only the birthing pains of enlightenment. Or so the story goes.

How many times was I told, if I would only pay attention, that the current subject being taught would impart to me some life changing thing, some spark of the divine? I don’t know.

I was thinking, as I sit here at a little past 2 AM, that we are told lies by teachers. I say lies but it is more of a stretching of truth. If you know this, they say, you will one day… what? Be successful? Find true love? Be popular?

Of course, I may only be speaking out of some frustration on my part of taking classes I dislike for reasons I dislike. That is probably the reason. Still, I can’t help but to think of all the work and time poured into the pursuit of knowledge. All that distilled wisdom of the ages and it’s hand picked and delivered into the minds of the curious. Sort of.

It occurs to me that very little of the Classics are taught anymore. Sure, the whole subject of what – and who – are Classical is a dizzying maze of academical tomfoolery, but still. There are these great minds of times long past that are being covered in the dust of our digital dirges. It seems as if no one reads books anymore. Sure, people read, but do they Read? I just don’t know.

Maybe I’m lamenting something that was never to be. I mean, consider that that my own reading is done via ponderous photons and not via some ink drunk dead tree. Even now as I pause between pages I’m just pressing plastic to metal not squinting against the black as I copy verbatim manuscripts in some damp dusk.

Could it be that I was convinced? Could it be that I believed too much and seek to convert? Maybe It did help me. Is there something to gain in the the struggle for the gnostic? Could be. You should probably read a book. One Day It Might Help You.