THE NEW NORM !!

 How mass maden-ess started ?

Deceived by fantasy

Before television and video games won the hearts of children, real life was learned by observing nature. Children discovered the basics of physics by climbing trees, jumping off rocks, building mud castles, bridging creeks, making kites, etc. They would read stories and hear some fables, but they knew enough about real life to separate fact from fiction.

Through contemporary entertainment, life and learning have been turned upside down. The emphasis is now on feelings and fantasy, not on facts or reality. In comparison, the latter may seem downright boring. Children learn to identify with magical creatures instead of down-to-earth heroes. They imagine mythical powers that prompt them to distort (either inflate or deflate) their own strength. So they shut their eyes to an unwanted reality, choosing instead the virtual experiences that feel better than the truth.  

Through group "dialogue" (which starts in kindergarten) children learn to measure good and evil by group consensus -- and that consensus is often based on the level of excitement, not on moral values. God's Word summarizes the results: "You love evil more than good...." Psalm 52:3

"After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. 'They laughed!' ...      "A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Coliseum."[1] [5]

Toying with Death
"Are we training our children to kill?" asked Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, an expert in the field of killology. For many years, he has "traveled the world training medical, law enforcement, and U.S. military personnel about the realities of warfare." He contends that point-and-shoot video games actually train young players to accurately shoot and kill human targets in spite of their natural, God-given resistance. His statistics validate his frightening conclusions:

     "Children don't naturally kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it... most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games.

     "Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one's own kind... Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your own kind....

When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on into that mid-brain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only sociopaths -- who by definition don't have that resistance—lack this innate violence immune system....  

       "During World War II, US Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle.... They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier. Men are willing to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this 'problem.'...

      "The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. ... Just as the army is conditioning people to kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards."[1] [5]

1. Desensitization & Brutalization

Col. Grossman explained that in the military 'boot camp,' "brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms" and cause you "to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill....  Something very similar ... is happening to our children through violence in the media—but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months. At that age, a child can watch something happening on television and mimic that action. ... When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening.”[1] He gave this example:

"The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive study on the impact of TV violence. It compared two nations or regions that were demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. 'In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate.

    "Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three-to five-year-old to reach the ‘prime crime age.’"[1]

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation published another revealing study last fall: "43% of the kids age 2 and younger watched TV on a typical day and... 26% had a TV in their room. The median amount of time spent watching: two hours a day."[5] Small wonder our elementary schools are changing! 

"... 93% of the 39 schools that responded to the survey said kindergartners today have 'more emotional and behavioral problems' than were seen five years ago. More than half the day-care centers said 'incidents of rage and anger' had increased over the past three years. 'We're talking about children—a 3-year-old in one instance—who will take a fork and stab another child in the forehead.'"

"Violence is getting younger and younger," said Ronald Stephens, director of California's National School Safety Center. "Initially, it was high schools that created these schools [for disruptive students], then middle schools. Now it's elementary. Who would have thought years ago that this would be happening?"[5]

Actually, Col. Grossman did. He cited a study by Journal of the American Medical Association on the impact of TV violence:

"Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that 'the introduction of television in the 1950s caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually.' (June 10, 1992)."  STILL BRAIN DEAD ? OR DID WE JUST WAKE OR WILL WE EVER???