Mass Media And Its Influences On Children Today
             Parents all around the country are faced with children in distress almost every night all year round. Often their children are shaking and weeping, they have nightmares and climb into their parent's bed refusing to sleep alone. At this point parents wonder whether their child is reacting to the bully who threatened him/her at school. Most likely this is not the case; since this is a pure product of the children's imagination or perhaps the reenactment of something they have seen on TV. In the case of the Columbine High School incident it was a fatal combination of mafia movies versus real people whose lives were obscurely taken away.
             When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (the two teenage boys involved in the shooting) ended their lives, their suicide carried the explicit message that in the end they retained power over themselves. Their shooting rampage was an act of retaliatory violence. They saw themselves, more or less correctly, as victims of prejudice-motivated violence. They were stereotyped and discriminated against, verbally and physically assaulted on a regular basis. They lacked the resources to cope with their situation and perceived the school system, the teachers and parents as part of their oppression.
             As Thomas De Zengotita writes in his essay one of the boys that participated in the shooting appeared one morning in a local television show. He was a normal but geeky looking guy who had been bullied all his life and had taken away fifteen innocent lives to get his revenge. Zengotita then writes, "He thought a lot of other kids like him would kind of idolize the Trench-Coat mafia." (75). With this statement he is trying to say that movies, in this case the ones with the mafia topic, were an influencing factor in the decision making of these two young boys.
             Decades ago people who were eager to learn about events happening around the world invented the...