A few thoughts following the latest school shooting in Florida.
The, “self esteem generation” has the lowest self esteem of
all. That is because they were raised with unreasonably high expectations. They
were told they could achieve anything they wanted to, but were rewarded for
just the opposite: even losers got “participation trophies.” This did two things: it devalued real accomplishment, and it
gave kids the idea that they didn’t have to work hard to be rewarded. It also,
I suspect, actually diminished, in a sense, true self-esteem, as those who
received these participation trophies would come to realize that they did not,
in fact, really earn or deserve one. Young people who were told they were,
“special” found out that in the real world they were not. As Simon Sinek says (post below),
it wasn’t necessarily their fault. It was their parents’ generation who raised
them this way and ingrained these attitudes into them.
So take these disillusioned young people and put them in
front of a computer, where their community is social media, where they and
others can express their rage and frustration with impunity and without
consequence, except receiving similar rage from others also online. Let that
rage fester and increase, with no immediate outlet or restraining mechanism,
such as face to face communication or community social restraint, and in
certain cases it builds until it explodes.
Guns have been around for hundreds of years, but this spike
in mass shootings, for the most part, has occurred, as I see it, with the
advent and rise of social media use in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. I’m not sure I can
explain it any better than that, but that is the connection I see.
Take Care