Eight years ago this month I was on maternity leave and visiting the U.S. with Carlo and the kids. In those days I still agitated occasionally for a move to America, hoping Carlo would be won over by the good things about it.
One morning we took the kids over to a photographer’s to have their pictures taken for my mother. Miles was 10 months old, and Luisa nearly 3 years old. When we got back in the late morning, we turned on the tv and watched “the Columbine massacre” unfold death by death.
The rest of the trip seemed to be a blur of funerals for the children and teacher murdered at Columbine. And it was pretty much the end of my trying to convince Carlo to move to the states. Not because I thought I was wasting my breath, but because I wasn’t so sure I wanted my kids growing up in a culture sponsored by industry lobbyists.
Sometimes I can’t remember what the good things about America are. Was it the nature I loved? The friendly, open people?
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6 comments:
Maybe it was our news channels that turn tragedy and murder into a ratings race and their own personal soap-opera which leads to more murder, more tragedy, because if there's anything that Americans love as much as money, it's fame.
mix in violence and voilà.
my brother worked once for network tv and i remember what a theater the news was. stories were highly dramatized, since why else would anyone watch? A school massacre is like a gift to them.
i love america, but there are so many aspects of it that for me as an ex-pat stick out as sick. The inability to control guns is surely one.
List tag...
The type of mind numbing stupidity that allows unstable people to buy guns from gun shops that problably aren't staffed will employees able to determine the sanity of the people buying guns makes me physically ill.
Imagine sleeping at night after making such a sale. I wonder if the employee that sold this gun, or the owner of the shop feel any sense of responsibility?
Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Yeah right, as clearly evidenced in Blacksburg...
I've lived in both VA and CO, and can tell you a community does not EVER get over an event such as these. It marks the community forever.
Sick.
would you believe that on the day of the massacre, an austrian politician starts campaigning for more liberal gun laws, citing the USA as the model?
left me speechless.
m
I work for a news agency and read the news all day long. over the past week, besides these murders, I've read about a guy in Arizona who pulled out his gun when firefighters refused to rescue his cat from a tree, the minister's wife in tennessee who didn't mean to shoot her husband with the handy shotgun but her "ugly came out," a guy in texas who was doing target practice and killed a first grader "by accident," and a guy in queens who was having tough times with his mother so decided to kill her, her boyfriend and the home health care worker. He was mad, you know! And everybody gets mad, or mad and drunk, or sad and reckless, and these everybodies amount to a whole hell of a lot of people who'd never have trouble getting a gun and might sometime be just as fed up as the preacher's wife who was tired of her asshole husband telling her she was overweight. Who wouldn't sell a gun to her?
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