On Steubenville, Public Shaming & Social Change

Ever since reading about the Steubenville rape case last year which saw a group of Ohio football players tweet photos of themselves raping a passed-out teenage girls, I've watched the case play out in the media with a kind of disgusted fascination. I feel like I was joined in the past week as the guilty verdict in the case brought to the surface a lot of truly frightening assumptions about rape and sexual violence that are all-too-common in American culture.

From cable news' coverage of the verdict that focused more on sympathizing with how the sentences would ruin the lives of the rapists than the horrificness of their crime to the waves of Facebook and Twitter responses that basically amounted to justifying rape and blaming the victim, it's been shocking and just soul-crushingly dispiriting seeing how many people are willing to apologize for this crime. In response, there's been a torrent of blogs, memes and articles from feminists responding to these attitudes with anger, vitriol and justified horror. Although I'm always comforted seeing people willing to confront discrimination and , I've recently started thinking that all those critiques of the reactions to Steubenville might be missing something.

It's not that I don't find the responses being criticized to be misguided, ignorant and often truly disgusting because, believe me I do. My thought here is that maybe there's something to be said for trying to distance oneself from a surface-level response to what's being said by reporters or internet commentors and trying to view the conversation of a broader level. 

On The Gun Control Debate

I know that I'm not unique when I admit that I cried after hearing about Newtown. Most of us in America did. And then a lot of Americans did something we haven't done with any real earnestness in a long-ass time - we started talking about guns and gun control.

Cards on the table, I don't think guns keep people safe. I have a lot of reasons for this belief. Like the fact that it's overwhelmingly clear that having a gun in the house increases the risk of being accidentally shot by a whole order of magnitude not to mention that it makes it much more likely that the home will witness a homicide, suicide or non-lethal aggravated shooting. Beyond that, I think that the logic that having an armed populace would provide a significant deterrent to dangerous criminals ridiculous - to use a perhaps overly-reductive example, I look at the most heavily armed neighborhoods here in Chicago and see little evidence that fear of getting shot prevents crime - indeed, it often escalates it.

Intro

Oh, hello there, I didn't see you come in. Well, greetings. My name is John M. Tryneski. Although, I guess the odds are that, at this point, if you're reading this, you probably already knew that. I'm a 26 year old guy doing what seemingly every liberal arts school humanities major is doing, living on the periphery of a hipster enclave in a major American city, not working in a chosen career, trying to figure out how to turn my skills and passions into a life and career that won't look too bad on the ol' death bed.

Since I've been at this a while, this isn't my first blog. Since July 2011 I've written a blog called On Warmer Music. It started as a forum for all my musical rantings and ravings that I couldn't find an audience for at the bar and since lead to the opportunity for me to write about music, books and other things for the websites PopMatters and Spectrum Culture. I guess a little exposure is a dangerous thing because the more I've written about music and other aspects of pop culture, the more eager I am to write about broader ideas. So rather than keep shoehorning my own musings on life, the universe and everything into pieces supposedly about pop music, I decided to give them another home and thus was this blog born.

My goals for Learning To Think are modest. I present it simply as a space for my thoughts on anything that strikes my fancy that doesn't fit into pop culture criticism. The title is taken from a David Foster Wallace quote (yeah go ahead and check off another box on your Stuff White People Like at-home bingo card) where he talks about the idea that because each person's perception of reality must go through the filter of their mind, we as individuals have get to determine what has meaning in our lives. It's a simple but heady concept that I'm not doing justice but I attempt to elucidate slightly here.

Regardless, I make no claim as to the worthiness of my ideas, any insight they might hold or even their interest to you, as a reader. The older I get the more I realize how truly unspecial my talents or ideas are both in the "there are a lot more people who are a lot smarter than me than I realized"-sense as well as in a "the convergence of total data and a consumer culture on steroids means that no matter how cool you think you are there are thousands of people with eerily similar taste to you just a click away"-sense. But if that's the world I'm handed, can I do but gird my loins and try and make some fucking sense of it? Having been given a suitable temperament and platform for the job, this blog is an attempt to do just that.