Sure. You want to fix things?
Work less hours. Spend more time with your family. Stop drugging up your kids. Get to know your neighbors.
Do those 4 things and violent crime will plummet. Guaranteed.
Originally Posted by: zombieslayer
I.
Actually, violent crime has already plummeted rather a lot, hasn't it? I haven't looked at these stats lately (and everyone knows I hate generalizing about trends from short run variability), but I seem to remember that the trend for some time has been that violent crime has actually decreased rather substantially from where it was, say, at the end of WWII or during the peace-and-love 60s.
Do people really think serial killers, gang killings, and out-and-out thuggery are inventions of the 21st century?
Contrary to the received wisdom, the path of crime doesn't follow a nice linear path, any more than "environmental degradation" does. To be sure economic growth often gives rise to increased crime _at first_, as people try to come to terms with the new social and economic organization that such growth brings. Ask anyone who lived in the industrial north of England circa, say, 1820-1850. But then something amazing happens. Just as people in Parliament, or Congress or the NYTimes or wherever, speak of "something must be done," the system of affluence finds ways of improving those very conditions. ANyone who thinks that Englishmen in 1910 weren't substantially better off, virtually across the board, than ANYONE was in 1810 knows nothing of economic history. And anyone who thinks the America of 2012, even with the whacked government policies and the rapacious rich bastards, isn't better off, AND FAR SAFER IN THEIR HOMES, than the America of 1912, is similarly mistaken.
Do we have more serial killers and spree killers today? Probably. We have more than three times as many people after all. And we certainly know of more -- how often would someone in Dakota or Iowa or California in 1912 hear even the most outrageous news out of Connecticut or Colorado? Seriously.
"How big is 'big'?", indeed.
Hmm, I think I'm going to have to make a "crime statistics" project part of my new "basic numeracy skills" course this spring. Damn, another thing to do in January.
II.
To ZS's list I would add: turn off your damn TV news. Stop worrying about what's happening in Connecticut or New Orleans or Las Vegas. Stop letting your fears of dark and nasty things make you into a minder of everyone else's business.
Yeah, it's a tragedy. I get that. People think I'm a heartless bastard sometimes, but I'm not. I was in Iowa City when a disturbed graduate student went off and killed several students, professors, and an associate dean. One of my best friends was *in the seminar room* where the main killings took place. I frankly couldn't have handled it.
But you know what? He weathered that horrible event just fine. And you want to know why? Because he was one of the most grounded people I've ever been privileged to know. He put his life for God first, his family and his personal "community" second, and everything else -- EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING ELSE -- third. He did before the tragic events of that day, and he did it afterward. (I don't know if he still does, because I don't know, to my shame, what came of his bout with colon cancer several years ago and I've been afraid to find out. But that's my problem, not his.
We almost never agreed on politics. And, as I wasn't much of a Christian back then, I expect he didn't think much of my lifestyle choices. He probably still wouldn't, since though I do think of myself as a Christian in ways I never did then, I still make a lot of horrible -- and yes, immoral and all the rest -- choices.
Next to my father and, perhaps, my college advisor/former colleague, though, I think I learned more about what a person should be from him than anyone else I've known. And among the most important things I learned from him was how incredibly much of life in the big bad world was my concern. "Saving the world" is not an adult ambition. It is an adolescent one. The adult's ambition should be to be a good person. To be what you all are -- good friends...good parents...good neighbors. That's it.
That's enough.
Frankly, it's more than any of us fallen human beings are able to do all of the time.
After all, isn't that what we hate most about the busybody down the street or across the hall at work? That we know that *they* are as fucked up as any of us, and that *they* should spend more time worrying about how *they* are fucking up and less about how to stop us from fucking up?
In the end, we've all faced into the abyss at times, haven't we? Foster on the battlefield, Troy with his lovely little daughter's cancer, Jeremy's loss of his father, Kevin's loss of his mother, etc., etc. And if you think about it, how well you've handled those things says far more about your character and what's important about you as human beings as anything you or I might ever say about what a tragedy somewhere else means about life, the universe, and everyone.
I know it bugs some people when I get all religious on them, but I have to end it this way.
Strive to take care of your little part of the world to the best of your abilities. Strive to deal with the slings and arrows that fortune throws at you and yours. And let God worry about the rest.
After all, in the end, He's the only one capable of doing so.
Really.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)