When I drive, I never listen to the radio; instead, I prefer to listen to the music on my iPhone. And while driving the other day, I heard a song which made me think about the mass killings we’ve recently seen, from the Parkland high school shooting to that van attack in the streets of Toronto.

The song was “Nebraska,” by Bruce Springsteen. Yes, I’m a Springsteen fan. Don’t hate me.

“Nebraska,” for the uninitiated, is a 1982 song Springsteen wrote about spree killer Charles Starkweather. In 1958, Starkweather and his teenage girlfriend murdered 11 people over eight days while driving across Nebraska and Wyoming.

Springsteen sings the song in the first person, as if Starkweather was telling his story; however, he doesn’t romanticize the killer in either his lyrics or delivery. Rather, he makes the song dark and very disturbing:

I can’t say that I’m sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun

But what really struck me were the final lines of the song:

They declared me unfit to live, said into that great void my soul’d be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world

Just a meanness in this world. And I wondered why we’re seeing this ‘meanness’ explode among people who want to kill strangers for no apparent reason.

Oh, the Left can talk about too many guns, which of course has nothing to do with the Toronto van attack. Others point to lack of mental health care, or lack of support for bullied kids. And it all comes to down to more legislation of one sort or another.

But there’s one thing that no legislation can stop, and that’s the sickness of our collective soul. That sickness is the result of a perfect storm, a confluence of five factors which cannot be legislated away. Here they are, starting with:

• The 24/7 News Cycle. 

Consider this: a mass killing occurs, and the media report the name of the perpetrator. However, it’s not enough to give his name in a single story; instead, we hear it over, and over, and over. The media must fill in with sensational round-the-clock news, because, as the saying goes, if it bleeds, it leads. And leads, until the killer’s identity becomes a household name.

Daniel Greenfield, writing in his blog Sultan Knish, notes that FBI researchers have found that up to 20-30 percent of attacks are influenced by previous events. He adds:

Shootings that are widely covered by the media produce a cluster effect. After each attack, the risk of copycat attacks goes up for 13 days. If the media covers the attack, the copycat killers will come.

Now we find that Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz researched the 1999 Columbine massacre. If it bleeds, it leads, right?

But news media aren’t the only guilty party. Consider social media, or, more appropriately, anti-social media.

• The Cesspool of Social Media. 

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg can talk all he wants about wanting Facebook to ‘bring the world closer together.’ However, social media too often incites rage. Consider the California college professor who tweeted out her glee that Barbara Bush, “the witch,” was dead, because she was an “amazing racist.” Or the Toronto van killer who used Facebook to express his hatred for women because they had rejected him and left him as a virgin at 22. Moreover, he found camaraderie in a Reddit group of similar “incels,” or ‘involuntary celibates,’ who also express misogynistic wrath:

When I talk about incels to people lucky enough to have never heard about them, the first reaction is almost always sympathy for the “poor guys.”

Nope.

Here’s what they do with that self pity.

New from me and @oneunderscore__ https://t.co/rhbMx9QYWI pic.twitter.com/JDQ9PYv4XO

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) April 24, 2018

Or check out any Discus comments on articles at various well-known blogs, or Twitter at any time. They’re often swamps of rage at The Other, expressing charming wishes to another poster to “go f*** yourself,” or “die in a fire.” This is stuff that most people wouldn’t dare say to others face-to-face. Do you think a constant stream of this kind of coarseness won’t have its consequences among the marginalized?

• Fatherless Kids and Dysfunctional Familes.

Guess who’s consuming endless diets of such social media dreck — right, kids from dysfunctional families, where no father figure is around. 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control show that nearly 40% of all births are to unmarried mothers. That’s staggering. And the results are children who experience high levels or poverty, suicide rates, pregnancy, dropout rates, and crime.

And school shootings. Rick Santorum pointed out in a recent appearance on CNN that most of these perpetrators come from fatherless homes.

But, too often that’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. Yet it’s killing our social order.

• Hostility Towards Traditional Religion. 

Along with the collapse of the traditional family is the rejection of Judeo-Christian religious traditions. And I’m not just talking about a lapse of faith — this is downright hatred and scorn towards those who believe traditional creeds, particularly Christianity. Not only have the numbers of the religiously unaffiliated risen dramatically, we see absolute contempt in media towards the faithful. Recently GQ magazine put the Bible on a list of 21 ‘classic books not worth reading,’ calling it “foolish, repetitive, contradictory.” And then there’s the writer at the New Yorker who wrote an article dripping with contempt about the presence of a Chick-fil-A restaurant in Manhattan. Why? It wasn’t because the food was subpar. It was because Chick-fil-A’s corporate culture is . . . wait for it . . . Christian!

But when the leaders of a culture reject God, then who becomes the arbiter of morality? Why, they do, of course. They become their own gods, which too often leads to this:

• Rejection of the Value of Human Life.

A basic tenet of Judeo-Christian tradition is that human life is priceless. Yet the first half of the 20th century was filled with the results of evil men who rejected this notion, and instead declared that some lives were worthless.

From the Armenian Genocide during World War I, the Holodomor and the Nanking Massacre of the 1930’s, through the Holocaust during World War II, and the expulsion and massacre of ethnic Germans in postwar eastern Europe — an event that affected my mother’s family — evil men decided to play God and destroy people they despised.

It continues here in America today — through abortions. Because arbitrary destruction of unborn human life is done everyday by people who believe that such lives are Lebensunwertes leben — “life unworthy of life” — in the words of Nazi eugenicists. But it’s in the name of “equality” and “freedom,” so it’s all good.

Planned Parenthood started with the simple but revolutionary idea that your body is your own, and if it’s not, then you can’t be free & you can’t be equal. We’ve made so much progress in the last 101 years, but we’re not stopping until that idea is everyone’s reality.

— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) April 24, 2018

But when we see unborn human life snuffed out in the name of personal freedom, what does that teach the disaffected? That other human life — even strangers in the street — can be destroyed in order to make themselves feel better about their own lives. How are genocide, abortion, or wanton killings different from each other? They’re not. They’re all the products of someone playing God, someone deciding that they can take life without consequence.

Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world. And evil will always exist — no legislation will ever wipe it out. Legislation will only curtail freedom without significantly changing anything about evil.  But the only way to partly contain the meanness is to examine our collective soul and realize that it’s the path we’re on that is leading to more people wanting to kill strangers for no apparent reason.