Culture

On The Oregon Shooter

by

As you probably heard, the shooter apparently was on a campaign to kill sinners according to his diary.  It shocked his church and family, and it seems fairly obvious he was pretty troubled.

The thing is everyone is talking about how they were surprised.

I think by now, we’ve heard so many times that “oh, he shouldn’t have done that” or heard how “how surprising this is” to think that maybe we should stop being surprised.  It’s clear that when people miss someone is on the way to a violent breakdown missing it is no surprise because it happens all the time.

It’s up to us to watch out for each other.  Not keep watch on each other, we don’t need some panopticon police state in our heads (we’ve got enough would-be’s in the world).  We need to make sure we’re there to ensure our friends and family and neighbors don’t fall into the darkness.

It’s up to us to pay attention for when things look like they’ll fall apart.  It may not be a mass shooting (and for all of you I hope it never is), but it’s realizing someone may have a drinking problem, or is losing their way and falling in with radicals, and so on.

It’s up to us to actually care about each other as opposed to expect people to follow some rote behavior that will inevitably cause them to snap or snap worse.

When someone snaps and there’s surprise, that’s no surprise.  That’s a problem.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Yeah, Family, Sure.

by

Being the guy who always hears about people’s problems, I’ve sometimes noticed that “family” is a big source of problem for people.  It’s enough to ask me exactly what is going on with our culture.

Oh, sure there are plenty of functional families, and many functional-enough families.  But when my friends come to me with stories of their familial trainwrecks, I have to really wonder just what’s going on.  How does a social unit decay as far as some of these do.

I mean at times it gets absolutely outrageous – I don’t know how many times I’ve seen parents outright sabotage their own children, surprising as you’d think this whole propagation-survival thing would be preventing that.

Or watching families descent into destructive spirals that sabotage what stability they do have.

Or watching relatives fight over a will, ensuring that they’ve alienated each other and destroyed what they had for a few bucks.

It’s honestly pretty depressing – and I always get to hear about it.

Then when you watch your usual TV Schmaltz about the importance of family (about every other Disney cartoon) it never seems to ask what family is, what it’s about, and how people make it work.  Maybe part of the problem in our culture is family is just a commodity, a resource to be exploited, a brand name.  We don’t realize we have to make it work.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Anime Research – Jump On In!

by

Special thanks to Manga Therapy!

Want to get involved in Anime Research?  Well there’s an International Anime Research project that’s looking for data.  Don’t know too much about them right now, but I asked for an interview, and of course you can go scope it out yourself!

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.