I found
this story online a few minutes ago. I guess after awhile, you find yourself desensitized to a lot of the violence that takes place. But this was pretty shocking to me. Sometimes you wonder what the world is coming to; but then you realize it's always been this way in some form or another.

It's interesting when I'm around people of my parents or grandparents generation and they are talking about the days when things were safer, or better for people to live in as far as violence is concerned. I'm not sure if such assumptions have a lot of veracity to them. I wonder sometimes if a heightened perception of violence is just more apparent given the increased proliferation of media sources (especially electronic and visual).

My grandparents generation, for example, is one in which millions upon millions of people died from genocide- between Hitler and Stalin. My parents generation were witness to the horrors of what went on in places like Cambodia, where a government carried out systemic violence and cultural extermination against its own people. While life in 2005 can be terrible in that people are exposed through the media to violence; it always gives the potential of making us more aware of what is going on in the world (at least in theory).