Current Events Wednesday

Found out this morning that former supermodel Naomi Sims passed away due to breast cancer. The name was familiar, Naomi that is but I was thinking Naomi Campbell but that's another supermodel. Naomi Sims, from the Internet snippets I have been reading, she was the inspiration behind the "Black is Beautiful" movement in the 70's. Here below is a link to the wikipedia bio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Sims

Former President Clinton was able to secure the release of the two journalist, Euna Lee and Laura Ling who were imprisoned there on trumped up charges and sentenced to 12 years hard labor which in North Korea would've have pretty much have been a death sentence. Not sure why they were in the general area of the border between China and North Korea and the circumstances of their capture. Have to read up some more on it.

Now there's the big news about the shooting in Pittsburgh at an LA Fitness Center. The shooter was George Sodini, 48. He killed 4 people and injured a great many others. Very disturbed and sick individual obviously. I can't imagine the terror of being somewhere, say a grocery store and someone whose had a bad day or a bad life decides to go on a shooting spree. Unfortunately incidents like this seem to happen more often these days. We always ask the same "why" questions to no end. We always think we can analyze some textbook case of the next Travis Bickle. We always pick some guy who doesn't follow the standard life pattern. As popular as the film Taxi Driver is, we as a society still can't understand how to people develop into a Travis Bickle. Instead we have news commentators who have little to no knowledge of psychology or mental health disorders, providing their assessments which unfortunately are taken as gospel.

I don't think there's really any way to prevent this from happening again. Someone who is determined to hurt other people in a similar fashion will find a way to do it. It's terrible way to deal with any mental issues. I do believe that Sodini had some significant mental health issues, I mean obviously, but I think it was more than his presumed social problems. There are millions of people who have social anxiety disorder, manic depression etc, but only a small few of these people actually become violent towards other people. If Sodini was really lonely, he could've visited chat rooms and made some friends online, or he could've gotten a pet. If it was sex he desperately wanted he could've utilized an escort service or "took care of himself" so to speak. Anything could've been better than killing innocent people. So I think his problems were more deep seated than any superficial "needs". A person who is deeply disturbed doesn't really think about sex or having a social network. The anti-social behavior may have been a symptom but I've known people who were very social, regular social butterflies, but they were for lack of a better term nutcases.