You know it, I know it. The world is broken and falling in to chaos.

During World War II, economic collapse and deterioration led to most of the world's leading nations falling in to dictatorships. People back then were very different than they are now, however. People now are used to being independent, of telling themselves what to do, of buying what they want and having what they want. They don't need a fascist or communist leader to be nasty for them - they know how to do it themselves.

The deterioration you have, now, as a result, is the deterioration of people and their very spirits - not the deterioration of countries. In Nazi Germany, it was people dressed in military fatigues that took out their demons on Jews and other minorities - there is no need to do such a thing in our modern world. In the United States and Europe, the weapons are owned privately - people whose spirits have died can inflict the atrocities themselves.

That is one disturbing thing to remember when we think back to the rise of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin or other fascist/communist leaders. Those people were only people. If nobody wanted them around, they could have easily been taken down. If all these mass shootings are occurring, it's because alot of people decided to pick up guns and squeeze the triggers. Those hunks of metal don't kill people by themselves.

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About the same time I was in Micronesia, a friend of mine was in India. We had both lived in the Bay Area about the same time and idolized the respective cultures we visited. He said himself to me, "India sucked." Like me, he has come back....weird. On New Year's, my friend literally got invited to a New Year's Party but decided to skip in, go home and sleep. Very strange if you were to know my friend well.

Our experiences were eerily similar and reflected the collective darkness of today's society. Humans are a collective entity - anyone who thinks we're "individuals" is fooling themselves. Groups enter wars, groups enter depressions - history would look alot different if people ever really lived for themselves.

Cornel West was half right about the response to all of these mass shootings. People are mentally used to people (usually African American) being shot in America's ghettoes. For the same to be happening on an even more indiscriminate level (there was always alot of gun violence in the Central District of Seattle, where I grew up near, but it was always drug related - not indiscriminate massacres) in many of the sectors of society we thought couldn't be touched disturbs our very sense of structure and security. What happened in Connecticut was like something from a terrorist attack in a warzone.

It keeps going on. Mass shootings have occurred in European locales that have often been assumed to be the safest places on earth. It all symbolizes society dying. Society isn't some sort of giant living in the hillside. It's us. If society is dying, we're dying.