Thoughts on Sunday Bloody Sunday

Scott Peterson, O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Bobby Cutts, Drew Peterson, Cesar Armando Laurean - how many more?

WHY? WHY? WHY?

BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO!

Laci Peterson. Kathleen Peterson. Almost certainly Stacy Peterson. Nicole Simpson. Lana Clarkson. Christa Worthington. Those are just the famous ones. Maria Lauterbach. Amina Yaser Said. Sarah Yaser Said. Those are just the most recent "newsworthy” ones.

Fact: Women Murdered in the U.S in 2000 - recent yearly statistics available from the U.S. Department of Justice - more than 33 percent were killed by an intimate partner.

Fact: Nationally, homicide is a leading killer of young women—pregnant or not.

Must have missed the memo, because I thought we were supposed to be a civilized society, striving for improvement. We were supposed to be kind towards one other. War or attack aside, we were certainly not supposed to annihilate other human beings.

Instead, we seem to be in a place and time of unprecedented violence towards women and children. In a society that is completely hit-and-miss when it comes to convicting, imprisoning, or punishing the murderers.

Maybe it was always like this, but has the need to hammer it home for the 24 hour ratings-grabbing media reporting changed the program? It certainly feels as if our society has descended into some sort of collective psychosis - a violent whirlpool of rage, entitlement, and devaluation of human life.

Turn on any crime show (and I confess I watch some of them) and there are literally nonstop images of - mostly - women and young girls bound, tortured, pleading for their lives from behind their gags. Yes, the heroes and heroines are working feverishly to rescue these victims, but the camera always cuts back to those victims. And of course, women and children are much easier to target and victimize, on screen and off.

Have we become immune to the horrors of these acts and these images? I don't want to believe that this is what entertainment is, or that we have become a society so intellectually and spiritually impoverished that we think that as entertainment goes, so real life must follow.

Walking my dogs this morning, I had to pull hard to stop Sabre, an 80 lb. ball of fur, from going after a rabbit. That is instinct. Sabre doesn't see the rabbit as a living breathing creature with rights equal to his.

Humans are supposed to be more highly evolved. But if there is anything like an ethical evolutionary scale, we, the Human Race, are cashing in the chips, calling it a loss, and relegating ourselves to the lowest possible level imaginable.

From W.B. Yeats' poem "Slouching Towards Bethlehem": . . .

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. . .

What wouldn't I give to disagree with Yeats?