It's A Mad, Mad World

My husband and I were watching the news last night and amid all the shootings, stabbings, natural disasters, and people going crazy like the Toronto Mayor, we turned to each other and asked "are things going crazy?"  It seems like lately more and more violence and craziness is a happening.  Is it just me?

Social media and digital news allows mankind to report things faster and more accurately than ever before.  Couple that with the fact that people love to spread dirt around, maybe it's just that we are able to see more reports of bizarre behavior.  It's kind of like thinking there is an epidemic of an illness when in actuality more people are reporting it.  That could also be the case for the increase in violence that I observe.  According to a site I came across, the FBI has been reporting statistics since 1957 and there has been an increase not only in criminal acts, but incarceration for those acts as well.  This site also supports the theory that violence media is a cause. I used to poo-poo that idea, because I grew up with westerns where people were shooting people all the time and I didn't grow up to be a killer.  But I recently heard that PG-13 rated films have had a dramatic increase in violence scenes over the last 5 years so now I think that there really is a whole media-induces-violence thing going on.

Apparently killing for humans is not natural, again according to this site, and people have to be trained to do so. Violence also begets violence; we learn this behavior from our parents and therefore from others close to us as well.  According to the writer, when a young person sees a violent act happening on TV, it is as if it is really happening because that's how their brain works.  Seeing violence over and over again desensitizes the brain to these acts and after a while they bear no relevance to the difference between fantasy and reality and they begin to act in kind. So yes, I think the world is going crazy after all.  It's time to make a change.