Sound Bite Society

We have become a sound bite society. We like the events of our days to be boiled down to such simple factoids that we can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is spin. Sometimes I think that we as a society have allowed ourselves to accept the daily challenges of our society to blend into the background noise of tweets, texts and Facebook status'. Have we become so reliant on technology that we just take everything that we see online or on TV gospel? I started to think about this a lot more than usual after the tragic events of Friday in Connecticut. I have no words to express my feelings about what happened there, my heart goes out to the families involved. Almost immediately after the event the spin started, the pro and con gun control people cranked up their organs. Special interest groups began floating their arguments. While it is true that a gun was the weapon used to take all of those innocent lives. A gun is just a gun, it doesn't think and it doesn't act on its own. What we are failing to question is why this kid was in a state to perpetrate this act. What went wrong? How did he fall through the cracks? Lives were lost here, we need answers, real answers not spin. Have we become so hard hearted and thick as a society that we just prefer to look away when we see someone who is challenged? That is what society did here, the society that surrounded that kid has had a hand in all of that carnage. Do we need to question gun laws? Absolutely we do. I think that we need to fix a lot more than gun laws. Each incident that comes and goes in our lives is a chance for us to reflect and grow. Will we do just that? Or is this just going to be another of the tragedies of the year. There have been over 60 mass shootings in the US since Columbine, it is time to face up to things.