To say it was a rough weekend is an understatement. While people were still sorting out the incidents in Minnesota and Utahns were talking about the shooting at Saturday’s protest, the weekend in the Beehive State wrapped up on Sunday night with the deaths of three people, with two others injured in a shooting at WestFair, an annual festival in West Valley City, Utah. According to KUTV, a 41-year-old woman and an 8-month-old child were shot and died at the hospital, an 18-year-old died at the scene, and two teenagers were shot in the arm.
The reason? A fight between two groups of people. The 18-year-old was in one of the groups; the two teens who were shot may have been involved, while the woman and the baby had absolutely nothing to do with the altercation. Two people are dead because of a fight, and only because they had the misfortune to be standing near the combatants at the time. A sixteen-year-old was taken into custody.
When I was in the news business, I was often asked if people were simply becoming more violent or if we were just hearing about incidents more frequently because of the speed at which information was starting to travel. It’s true that we are barraged by headlines like never before. Consider this op-ed from Tipp Insights about recently scrapping two pieces because they aged out before anyone could actually publish them. So yes, the news ricochets around the web, and we find ourselves awash in headlines that may or may not be accurate. All too often, the news has been seasoned to taste to meet the needs of a narrative. So, yes, the world has always been awful to a certain degree, and people have been doing horrible things since Adam and Eve were served with their eviction notice; we just find out about it faster than we used to.
Has humanity become worse? After all, we have the legacies of Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and a host of others upon which to reflect. Those regimes and others like them fall by the wayside in the shadow of the word “Nazi,” which has been used so much that it is a few steps away from becoming a licensed franchise, complete with a copyright. In fact, it has been used so much and co-opted so often that the nightmare that was the Third Reich has all but been forgotten. In its place, we have MAGA, Trump, ICE, and all of the usual suspects that people like to dredge up, even while they themselves are making a solid run at tyranny and oppression.
I shudder to think what the world would have been like if history’s despots had access to social media. For the record, I tend to believe that people have gotten worse. Iran, North Korea, and China notwithstanding (not to mention the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria), and setting aside the decline of the UK and Europe, at least in the U.S., we have not crossed the red line that history’s monsters flew past. Yet.
I was in fights when I was younger. I was even mercilessly bullied at times, and those incidents included some violent assaults. Do you know how many times I entertained the idea of using a gun to settle the matter? Not once.
Chalk it up to whatever you want: video games, social media, a corrupt news media, even more corrupt schools and government officials, rap music, YouTube videos, trans agendas—the truth is the culprits are all of the above, and a few things that I have overlooked. I fear that the net result will be a country so chaotic and so feral that it will be ripe for the taking by whoever is ready to take advantage of the tumult. And those who are likely the ones driving the madness.
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