To the Editor:

The American news media and their reporters have effectively infiltrated various segments of American society in their attempts to shape public opinion. They have politicized the recent tragic events in Ohio and El Paso. They seek to convince viewers to overlook other significant aspects of these mass murders. But there are others now willing to admit that some of our adolescents are living in an isolated “visual virtual world” that lacks any resemblance to a reality filled with sensitivity and respect for fellow human beings. This “mental crisis” will continue so long as the current education model operates according to outdated “established mindsets” which prioritize “testing content” over “remedial mental processes,” which adolescents need to survive in this “toxic media environment.” As a result, adolescents fail to develop mentally without a curriculum involving critical thinking skills. Common sense is lost.

There are a number of mental challenges that young people have to confront as they develop mentally and emotionally.

They are bombarded with all kinds of media stories and reports that attempt to indoctrinate them while in school and at home. While they play war games and watch stories involving some 12,000 murders by the age of 16, there is a belief that this visual conditioning is not harmful. We mistakenly believe that these distorted depictions are not going to produce individuals who seek to want to make “a visual statement” and commit murder at an early age. So when it happens, the logical culprit are the millions of guns in American homes.

But there are adolescent aggressive behavior patterns that are associated with bullying, with attacking teachers and other students, with senseless destruction of monuments and religious figures, with death threats sent via the internet, with calls for acts of aggression against political figures and their supporters, with verbal attacks against anyone with different political orientation, and with TV news reporting that is designed to indoctrinate and even incite aggressive behavior.

We have allowed this dangerous perceptual disease to hollow out these adolescent minds so as to deprive them the right to figure things out using critical thinking skills which are not taught in American schools. Bruno Bettelheim in an interview with Psychology Today states that books children read in school show life as nothing but a succession of shallow pleasures. Nobody is angry. Nobody suffers. There is no real emotions.

The time has come for a realignment of our perception and our thinking in the design and operation of American system of education that continues to fail countless generations of adolescents.

Dr Rudy Magnan

60 Watkins Drive, Sandy Hook August 6, 2019