I have just read this story, and as I sit here still reeling from what I’ve read, I find it difficult to organize my thoughts. I don’t know where to start with a story like this. It's not a pleasant story.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20090709/tuk-shaquille-killers-jailed-for-life-6323e80.html
I genuinely don’t understand how things like this can happen. How can a group of young people suddenly become ‘a wild pack of dogs’ as the judge called them?? What on earth happens to these young people that they should suddenly and viciously attack and kill another young person? To me this is alien behavior. Blaming ‘soft’ sentencing or lack of parental guidance, or any of the other ‘reasons’ so often trotted out by politicians or the press go no way toward explaining why any one would want to do such a thing in the first place. Why would we need harder sentencing as a deterrent? Why would any one need deterring from this behaviour? why would they want to do it in the first place? To observe this behavior and then consider why it happens and what goes on in their heads is as big a mystery to me as quantum physics! It’s too easy to talk about the attackers as animals, sub human, evil, etc etc, or to rant about them deserving death by every horrible means imaginable. Expressing hatred and extremes of anger and outrage at these attackers goes no way toward understanding why they behave the way they do or how to prevent similar attacks in the future. And I can’t help thinking the last thing a situation like this needs is more volatile outbursts, anger on top of anger is like oil on fire, it feeds the flames rather than allowing us, as a society to rationally consider how and where it all went so horribly wrong, and then do something about it. The venom and vigilante attitudes so often whipped up by the tabloids have more to do with selling and profit than it does with any serious attempt to understand and prevent this aberration of ‘normal’ behaviour. As far as I can see no one is making any rational attempt to understand why the mentality of mindless violence is spreading like a plague through our society. Every one seems more interested in raging against the perpetrators of this type of crime than in dealing with it. At least that’s the way it seems to me.
