[The education reform movement] provided a new generation of consumer-oriented parents with information about the performance of schools, and published rankings of schools to stimulate market competition between them. Instead of measuring what we value, we have got stuck in valuing what we can easily measure.”
Dr. Andy Hargreaves
Work in progress. Decorating a wooden, book-shaped box with craft paper and cut-outs from Alice in Wonderland.
THIS CAT IS ASKING TO BE PETTED IT IS ACTUALLY ASKING THIS IS THE MOST POLITE CAT IN THE WORLD AND IT’S GOING TO KILL MEbaby
(Source: cineraria)
OK, I agree we over-react to “terror” and under-react to “every-day gun violence” but we can’t pretend like those two things are the same thing.
Shooting someone is generally an attack on a person. The reasons for shooting that person may be hatred, jealousy, greed, or idiocy, but you’re shooting a person.
Blowing up the finishing line of a marathon is not an attack on a person, it’s an attack on a culture.
There are a lot of reasons why we see “terror” as more terrifying, and some of those reasons are bad (like that we’re “used to” gun violence, and that most of those deaths take place in communities that people in power don’t identify with or understand well.)
But there are also good reasons why we feel this way. We all recognize that we are cultural beings, and thus attacking culture is viewed as worse, and should be viewed as worse, and /IS WORSE/ than attacking people, because the culture we create as individuals is more important than any single person.
An attack on a culture is felt as an attack on every member of that culture. This is why “hate” crimes are often categorized differently, because those acts are often aimed not at hurting an individual, but at hurting all people who are “like” that individual.
So while the personal tragedies of the Boston Bombing are no more or less tragic than the personal tragedies of those 900,000 gun deaths, those incidents are different, and should be treated as such.
One could argue that gun violence is the new culture of this country. Not a culture I care to be a part of.
(Source: drunkonstephen)
