Today’s Movie Theater Massacre

News is still breaking about today’s attack in Aurora, Colorado, on a movie theater audience for The Dark Knight Rises. While I am saddened, I am neither shocked nor surprised. The latest American massacre (12 dead at this writing) is more evidence that the United States of America is in decline and dying. While movies matter and have the potential to bring us together, the assault demonstrates, especially to those who hate talking politics and avoid thinking about serious issues, that life can be wiped out in an instant by those who worship death. Today’s movie theater massacre reminds us that finding and applying the right philosophy is a matter of life and death. In my experience, many people turn the other cheek from the facts of reality by striving to make and see movies as an escape from reality – or they turn up their nose at political activism while perched in front of a television, from a comfortable place or detached from daily life in an intellectual ivory tower insisting that movies are “just movies” – and this bloody Friday shows that we are urgently running out of time. The president Obama, speaking this morning about the attack, says this act of mass murder is “beyond reason.” As usual, he – whose political philosophy is rooted in a death premise – is wrong. Today’s act, which is what it is, is perfectly accessible to the mind. Not only is the movie theater massacre open to our knowledge and understanding; life and happiness are only possible by choosing to think and live by a philosophy of reason, egoism and capitalism. In other words, Objectivism.