I wasn’t going to write another blog until Friday night, but then I logged on to the computer this evening, and the first thing I saw was a news headline on my Yahoo homepage: “Gunman fires into a class at Northern Illinois University, killing five before shooting himself.”

I just sat there, staring at the screen. Not again, I thought. Why, within just the last week a young woman walked on to the campus at Louisiana Technical School and killed two other students then herself; six people were killed in Missouri when a guy opened fire at a city council meeting; and five female employees in Chicago were gunned down in a Lane Bryant store. Now this?

What on earth is wrong with people today? When did our society become so unreservedly violent, so oblivious to the value of human life, and so indifferent to suffering and pain? I just don’t understand what is going on in today’s world. How can a person take a gun (or guns), stroll nonchalantly into a school, office, or store, and then proceed to slaughter innocent people and do it so mercilessly and cold-heartedly?

Of course, I guess the question is really why these people decide to vent their spleen upon the rest of the world in the first place. Are they that selfish? Yes. Are they that uncaring? Yes. Are they that unbalanced? Yes. Then again, although they may be all these things and more, I think they do it mainly for notoriety. They want to have their faces on the evening news, in the newspaper, on Yahoo, and on the cover of Newsweek. They want to be noticed and remembered, even if it is for some atrocious act. They want fame, however fleeting. They do not like being unrecognized and unacknowledged, in other words, ignored. They honestly believe they are entitled to the world’s recognition and even adulation; and they don’t care what they have to do in order to receive it. They just want to be noticed. They believe they deserve to be noticed.

And as a result, the rest of us have to live in fear. You might not be afraid, but I certainly am, and I think we all need to be afraid. After all, at this very moment, there is probably some self-absorbed, nihilistic, pathetic excuse of a human being sitting in his (or her) self-imposed isolation, feeling sorry for himself as he listens to the repetitious, mindless lyrics of some depressing song about murder, mayhem, and suicide, and he’s plotting to get his revenge on the world for not paying him the attention he thinks he deserves, for refusing him the job promotion he thinks he deserves, or else simply for denying him the parking space he thinks he deserves. And, for all any of us know, this lunatic might wake up tomorrow and decide to make the rest of us pay for not giving him what he thinks he deserves; and so, when we go to work or school or shopping, he will come strolling through the doorway and open fire, slaughtering everyone unlucky enough to step into his field of vision—and that could include me; it could include you; or it could include someone we love.