"Rather it brought me some peace of mind..."

(Look up that quote and its author if you need to be disturbed...)

When I was watching the 10:00 Evening News and heard the story about the 15 year-old girl that murdered a 9 year-old girl. I was taken aback. I was totally and utterly shocked. Not because it was a girl, though that is a disturbing fact.

I just could not believe that a 15 year-old could kill another child, a younger child at that. I make my living working with kids right between those ages.

Then the next day in my class, Slade was reading an article about the case and he told me it said that the 15 year-old dug the grave before committing the murder and after committing the murder and people began searching for the 9 year-old, she lead the police to the graves.

That blew me away. I started talking to this girl next to me (who was my boss at the nursery I worked at in the Methodist church in Manhattan...she is a hippy and is getting married on Earth Day...smoke that in your peace pipe...) and she was taken aback. She said, (and this really got me thinking) "Well, it's no surprise. Our society is so fascinated with death."

I started thinking about our entertainment.

• Gory, horror movies have had a resurgence this past decade. Most just awful, more gory rehashings of 80s classics, but still people seem to like movies where people die. New additions to the gore-slasher movie genre have pushed the envelope past anything audience had ever seen before, and we ATE IT UP. For instance, there are two Hostel movies and six in the Saw franchise. Why do audiences want to go back 6 times to see movies where a sociopath forces people to kill one another, putting their animalistic self-preservation instincts into action?
• The MOST POPULAR tv shows (outside of "Reality" TV hell) are police procedural dramas:
• 5 CSI shows or spin-offs including - CSI, CSI: NY, CSI:MIAMI, Without A Trace (cancelled), and Cold Case. I watch none of them, but millions of Americans do.
• Criminal Minds. I do watch this show and I love it. The thing that seperates this show apart from its CBS brethren (all those other shows if you didn't know are on CBS and so is this, it is CBS' niche if you will) is that it follows a BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) in the FBI based in Quantico, Virginia that try to get in the minds of the serial killers they track every episode. Behavioral Analysis is a big thing in the Special Education, seeing it applied to adults is neat and interesting.
• Bones
• 3 Law & Order shows - Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit 
• The other popular genre of TV shows year after year: medical dramas. Not every episode is about death, but hell, almost every other patient is dying or needs some life saving procedure.
• ER ceased production so NBC crafted Trauma, and Mercy.
• CBS has Three Rivers.
• Fox - House, M.D.
• And most famous of all for the ladies...Grey's Anatomy. (Which I have gotten sucked into.) and its "scratch your head as to why they even made it" spinoff Private Practice.
• There is a mainstreamed subculture of "Vampire entertainment", and Vampires kill people for sustenance.
• Twilight (and all its coming sequels like New Moon).
• The Vampire Diaries
• True Blood (HBO exclusive show)
• Almost all religions have a focus on death or what comes after death. Religions (or Faiths if you are a hippy and the word "religion" makes your skin crawl...) also focus on what adherents are suppose to do during their life times, but they all provide humans with answers about what to expect in death and the hereafter. You may become an adherent of a faith so as to change your fate and avoid a feared path in the hearafter (i.e., people becoming Christians for "fire insurance").
• Shooting video games: some of the top selling video games center around the killing of others from aliens in the Halo franchise, a random derelict in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, or some foreign enemy in the Call of Duty franchise of games. It's cathartic to push the X button and watch your opponents life juice drip out of a hole in their body or some corporeal matter blowing out of the back of their head. It is, I admit it. I mean can you say "Bond" Blue House boys?

We as a society entertain ourselves with things centered around death. I don't know if that is a product of us being post-modern (I am not even sure what it means to be "post-modern") or what, but I think that is one of those things that brings up the comment, "I think that says something about the society we live in."

I am guilty of joining in this morbid fascination with death. My favorite holiday of the year is Halloween because it focuses on monsters and the dark side of the human imagination. I love the imagery tied to skulls, skeletons, and the Grim Reaper/"Angel of Death".

I am fascinated by serial killers, society's most feared murderers because they get some variety of joy(s) out of bringing death to people. Ever since I had to read the book High Risk: Children Without a Conscience, which basically said that serial killers are crafted by the amount of or lack of nurture they receive before 5 years of age, I have been even more fascinated with them. I bought a bargain bin DVD that chronicles the lives of 10 of America's most notorious serial killers. (Haven't had the time to watch it, but I will.) The fascination is the reason why I like Criminal Minds. I sometimes daydream about writing a novel or a movie script about this obscene serial killer, the likes of which the world has never seen.

(I think that without Christ I could easily have drifted down that road, because before I started attending church I had no lifelong friends. I would have become some lonely, intelligent adult living some normal duldrum life, just waiting to snap and ruin peoples lives. Which is what most serial killers are. These kind of sad, seemingly normal and content individuals, who are usually very intelligent and clever people whose only true joy is in bringing other people pain. Thank God for friends, right.)

I have terrible daydreams about death and dying that completely freak me out.

I do not want to be the social critic (or any other kind of critic) who is so pretentious and asinine that I pretend as if I am not a part of the problem. If fascination with death is a problem, I am part of that problem. I am fascinated with it. You may think to a peculiar level. The things I criticize I usually am part of the problem. Sometimes I take a stand against said things, oftentimes out of some form of convenience or cowardice, I do not.

(Except for the Bush Administration. I railed against that catastrophe and was not apart of the problem. However in 2004, I just did not vote out of laziness, and so therefore was not part of the solution either - voting him out of office - so I should have been quiet from 2004-2008, but I was not. I formally apologize to the world if you care. sidenote - I just looked up railed, because I like to make sure that my attempts of using diverse vocabulary words are semantically correct, and I most definitely and appropriately can say that I truly did "rail" against the Bush Administration.)

Why did a 15 year-old have a fascination with death? Why do middle school students play a game where they teeter at the front door of Death before oxygen reels them back into the world of the living?

I don't know, but I feel like we must examine why and find some kind of an answer. My classmate brought up the seemingly fact statement that we as a society are fascinated with death, so naturally our youth (which do everything sooner now) will develop that fascination and perhaps that led a 15 year-old Missourian girl to murder. Perhaps.

I have brought up some forms of entertainment that we as a society partake of that center around the topic of death. I use to be of the camp that, well whatever you watch or do, you are responsible for how that affects you. That is an ASININE and IGNORANT viewpoint to have. With some things, as a fully functioning adult, yes I am able to do that. I can watch The Vampire Diaries and not want to turn into a vampire or suck people's blood. Other things, I am not able to partake in and act responsibly, I am better off avoiding entirely.

I am saying that it is foolish to think that all people have the psychological wherewithal to keep something they read, play, hear, watch, or see from affecting their behavior all the time in all accounts. It is hard for adults, so how much harder would it have been for this 15 year-old girl? You may then turn to blame the parents, but parents cannot filter EVERYTHING that their kid is exposed to.

Are the manufacturers of these things to blame? Television, movie, and game producers?

Is it just the eternal scapegoat, "We live in a sinful world." I hate falling back on that all the time. It's a tired ass scapegoat.

I work with kids for a living, but it is also a passion. Children are a passion of mine, and not in a serial killer kind of way. The report of a 15 year-old killing a 9 year-old because she wanted to know what it felt like to kill a human being (she had no prior discipline problems at school and was like number 3 in her class) is personally disturbing to me.

I am asking all these questions, because there are no answers. I know there are no clear, easy answers. That is the sad fact of the matter.