"Won't someone think of the children?!"

Kneejerk reactions to the perceived anti-social behaviour seems to be the norm these days. Every time there is a horrible event such as the Columbine shootings or the more recent Virginia Tech shooting, there is the long-standing search for answers and reasons and scapegoats.

We all recall the blame heaped on everything from Grand Theft Auto to Marilyn Manson to the breakdown of the family unit whenever stuff like this goes wrong, but this also starts bringing up alarm bells to the point of paranoia.

While I do admit to a certain level of responsibility from the media to inform the general public, all it's doing is promoting fear and ruining lives in the process. For me, it makes me recall a talk that Ian Hanomansing (CBC Newsworld anchor) gave on the portrayal of awful events in the media. As it stands, in the western world, we actually have it pretty good. For the most part, we can walk down the street without fear of gang rape, death by suicide bomb, or attack by Africanized honey bees. But, the news media would tell you otherwise.

The old adage stands true as always: a dog bites a man, that's not news. Man bites dog...

When events like these occur, it's always a national tragedy that reaches the hearts of everyone. It also puts a lot of unnecessary fear into them, and then the people in authority start instituting excessive and ineffective measures, just so it looks like they're doing something important. Racial profiling isn't necessarily new, but somehow nerdy Asian guys are suddenly the object of scrutiny.

With the Virginia Tech shootings, it's in your face and in your homes all the time, unless you make a point of ignoring it altogether. But, when you have a kid that makes a CounterStrike map and modelling it after their school, this somehow indicates that they're a walking, ticking time bomb. There was somebody that did that, and because of somebody's over-reaction, he doesn't get to graduate with his high school class. Oh, yeah...and the kid was Asian, just like the Virginia Tech shooter.

During my teenage years, make-work assignments to fill class time would happen every so often. Sometimes they got creative, though. One involved the story exercise where you write one portion, and pass it to the next. Some of what we wrote depicted some very sick stuff. Somebody else started a story with me as the protagonist, where I was trying to kill the English teacher's cat. I ran with it, as expected.

Writing it back then? We all have a few laughs. Writing it today? I get removed from my school and I don't get to graduate with all my friends.

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