Saturday, January 19, 2019

The end of the article that I quoted at the previous page was surprisingly bad, until I realized that someone who has made his living from the entertainment industry is not about to blame that industry for promoting gun violence or other violence.

Basically what he says at the end of his article is to lock up the guns and the crazy people, rather than to eliminate the guns, fix the mental health care system so that it stops making people worse more often than it helps them, and stop the entertainment industry from glamorizing violence and producing fictionalized, stigmatizing movies and other entertainment entrenched in archaic stereotypes about mental illness.  Mental illness should not be exploited for laughs, for thrills or for melodrama.  There is also no need to continue to attempt to correlate mental illness with genius.  There are plenty of mentally ill people who aren't that smart, and there are plenty of smart people who aren't mentally ill, although the latter of those statements is something that many people who are neither mentally ill nor all that smart don't like to admit. 

I know that debunking those stereotypes makes people uncomfortable, and I don't have a problem with their discomfort.  If you don't want to believe that mental illness can happen to anyone, that's because you're a bigot, no matter how compassionate you think you are.

If you want to know how to kill people, all you have to do is watch American television in the middle of the day.  You don't even have to watch television late at night, see an R-rated movie, or buy a video game that has warnings written on it.