Where's the Escape

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On the way home from the concert Monday night I stumbled upon a police roadblock not too far from my house. I made a detour through the back streets; and, once I made a red light I pulled up a local news station. Sure enough, another shooting. I think we had six on Monday (including a 3-year-old who shot himself with his parents' gun). The one that blocked my way home turned out to be a fatal. The punch line to this is my brother is rather upset about the fact that I'm going to the "murder capital of the country," Chicago, for a concert next month. I suppose he hasn't seen our very own city's murder stats for the past two years (we're approaching 100 murders for the second consecutive year, and we have weeks to go in this year). Our murder rate, per capita, is higher than Chicago's. Where's the escape from all of this insanity? People in small town Texas are getting mowed down in church. Offices, schools, malls, rich affluent areas, poor slums. You name it, there's shooting going on. I've said this before, but it really needs to be shouted from the rooftops: the best thing we can do as a society is stop glamorizing gun violence. How many people were killed in the last action film you saw? I have an ad that pops up in my innocuous Bejeweled Blitz game for shooting zombies...with pretty intense, graphic graphics. And, if I need to remind you, the Columbine tragedy was inspired by The Basketball Diaries. These games, and these films (and the TV shows, and the books, and the songs) show people that solution number one is pull out a gun and blast away. Don't talk. Don't "count to ten." Don't try to find a peaceful, logical solution. I wonder if we're too far gone, if our gladiator-like quest for blood in entertainment has pushed us as a society to the point of no return, where we'll eventually wipe one another out over someone cutting in line at McDonald's. If there's an escape from this insanity, let me know where it is. And, as I say, it's really nothing new. Here's Steely Dan singing about it in 1974: