Personal ignorance generally finds its basis in personal fear.

As a climate of fear promotes the growth of belligerance like a fungus over the Whitehouse and the likes of Fox News, individuals are lead to focus on those things which frighten them. Not, "frighten," in the sense of watching a horror movie, but "frighten" from the perspective of a person dropped helplessly into an enclosure with a rapacious and hungry preditor.

A point that the movie, "Bowling for Columbine," made that I think is germaine is the fact that Columbine is the home to a major defense contractor. As an employee of a major defense contractor, I have some sense of the climate and of the personality types that inhabit my work "ecosystem." To suggest that a climate of fear permeates the defense industry would be an understatement. That the climate of fear promoted by the defense industry contributed mightily to the events of Columbine seems a reasonable hypothesis.

Equally worthy of research and supposition is that the climate of fear promoted by the Whitehouse and it occupying administrative junta is the hypothesis that the level and intensity of violence that occurs within a society is directly related to the level and intensity of the fear present within that society.

Individual actors will always be present within the society, each with their own individual motivations, shortcomings, flaws and redeeming qualities.

Far more critical and often subordinated by the current genre of shock-trauma journo-mediaists are the larger themes in which these individual actions take place. Acts of violence are most often acts of desperation, and the present crisis at Virginia Tech is no exception. It is the leadership of the society that must accept a larger accounting for events like these.

For too many years and at too high a level of intensity, the United States has trumpeted the clarion call of mortal terror and infernal fear as a means of promoting corporate economic interests.

Eventually, the human mind implodes or explodes under the strain of attempting to reconcile the dissonance between a social contract entered into for the purpose of personal security, and the social fact that no such security is possible, present or desireable.

The whole obscenity angle on these firings is clearly a barnum, a distraction, and yet another attempt on the part of Karl Rove to divide and conquer public opinion on what should be clear-cut cases of multiple obstructions of justice.

These prosecutors were fired because they were doing their jobs properly and vigorously, not because they didn't prosecute enough child pornography cases.

Perhaps if the Bush Administration had not excelled at committing constitutionally pornographic abuses of executive authority in the first place, these prosecutors might have had more time to violate our civil rights in the new and interesting ways Alberto Gonzales has always intended.

...at the speed with which young people in this country pronounce, "oh, so it was about HIM. It's not our fault."

"Gotcha" politics at its finest.

Never has the issue of public health, be it mental or physical, been about blame or fault. Always and forever, public health issues are about R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-I-L-I-T-Y. Something the children of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era know precious little about, apparently.

The armchair quarterbacking of the assailant's video by non-professionals has been dubious to say the least. People see a madman, but I see a human being who has suffered mightily from chronic and acute bouts of a severe depression. The condition deteriorated to the point where the only "antidepressant" that this individual could rely on was their own adrenalin.

And this sad fact is pathetic.

Had this individual NOT had any contact with mental health professionals one could certainly make a case for some manifestation of human evil in a world gone mad, but that was not the case here. This young man was identified and accurately assessed to be a danger to himself and others.

So what did the Reagan and Bush Administrations do to deal with this contemporary, if recurring, issue of Americana?

First, they made it a "middle class" issue by defunding mental health and other public health programs for society's outcasts. This essentially sent these individuals back into the homes of people who clearly were under terrific strain already. Brilliant. Next, they established a media multiplex where it now becomes possible for the rich elites and the bellicose misinformed to further stigmatize the mentally and emotionally disturbed, virtually guaranteeing that these people will NEVER seek professional help. This seals off the problem from its potential solution.

Works every time: manufacture problems for the middle class, blame them for the problems and then turn them against each other while selling snake oil to both sides of the issue with impunity.

We had this argument during the 19th century and, with the help of people like Dorothea Dix, we began solving it in the early 20th century. We nearly had the problem solved when it suddenly became imperative for Ronald Reagan to throw the entire country back into the 19th century and a time that pre-dated our failures in the Dust Bowl, in Korea and in Viet Nam.

When all else fails for conservatives, they get nostalgic for bedtime stories, fairy tales and a staunchly stubborn faith in the efficacy of the Easter Bunny.

Sick people who have lost most of their marbles can not be held entirely responsible for their behavior. That means we make leaving the adult world of competition and challenge very attractive for them and allow the professionals to fix the broken people that capitalism and other fairy tales always leave behind.

Until this country finds itself again and restarts a program of democratic social maturity, I think we need to make viewing this broken young male's depressive death spiral compulsory education for all viewers prior to their coming of age.

Depression is a horrible, ugly disease. In some ways it is worse than leprosy. But the solution for all sickness is healing, not shaming and stigmatizing the sick.

Why, that's just like blaming the victim, isn't it?