Cages


Yet another mass school shooting this week in the U.S. and I have to ibid my missive of a few days back. Interesting that the media doesn’t pick up that more people have been killed this year by insane gunmen at schools than by international terrorists (excepting those troops put in Iraq and Afghanistan), and that this is simply a sub-category of the overall murder rate (my city has had something in the vicinity of the mid to 20’s in regards to homicides this year alone). To be direct, sod the hullabaloo about Al-Queada, and let’s address the urban terrorist issues and social problems saturating our communities.

Perhaps it is the deterioration of the “community” as a whole that is part of the problems. In my little suburban niche, though surrounded by people, we really only know 2-3 of our neighbours. The fact is, we no longer have the communities where people know each other, offering familiarity and safety. We can see this self- isolation everywhere in urban settings – people listening to ipods on the bus, socializing done through email and in chat rooms where we will dialogue with strangers who, should they have been encountered on the street without the microchip buffer to protect ourselves, we would never speak with. It’s a catch-22 really, the whole fear of being friendly, I suppose. But the question remains, what happens when we cage social animals such as ourselves?