Poor Girl, Poor World

Caitlen Watkins, 18 years old, stabbed a guy 6 times with an ice pick after he took the parking spot she'd been waiting for outside of a shopping mall..

I'm not sure if she hit him because her boyfriend was in a fistfight with the spot-stealer, or if she planned it out after he ignored her verbal diatribe. Either way, she, and her boyfriend, were out of the car, in a physical scuffle, had an ice pick, and a previously innocent girl hit the guy a few times. The spot-stealer hit her in the face so she picked him a few more times, he collapsed, and the teens drove off.

Regardless of whether she's right or wrong, I feel bad for Caitlen Watkins. Her rage drove her over the edge, and there's really no going back. Will she go to jail? Will she get anger management classes? What will her future look like?

And why does an 18 year old do such a thing? Has shopping become so frenzied an experience that it causes this time of outrage? Are limits and boundaries disappearing among people as they determine what a person should or should not do?

I certainly know road rage. And I definitely know the feeling that you just HAVE to make a wrong-doer understand that what they're doing is unjust. After all, no one else, the law included, is going to stop a guy from being selfish or rude, or from stealing a parking spot. And I imagine that, for a brief moment, it might have felt good, to have served a bit of justice.

But would I stab a guy who took my spot. No, I hope not. But I can imagine being livid. I just have the good luck of knowing where to draw a line. You would hope that an 18 year old would also know when to walk away. But would they?

Would they know with the way we run society now? The lack of laws on the road, the emphasis on individual gain, the importance of having more of everything, and the sense of entitlement that comes hand in hand with the wealthy. And despite our recession, we are a wealthy nation. But we're a threatened wealthy nation who has seemed to have forgotten what limits are, and why sometimes limits are good.

So is this just one tragic story? Or is this a precursor to continued teen violence from kids who don't know anything about control? Or is this something that's been going on a while, and only the far fetched stories draw our attention now that we're so jaded to the problems of our world.

Half optimistic, half pessimistic, I want to believe the best of the world. A balance of good and bad have always existed in the world, why must there be a tipping point now? But historically speaking there always has been one. We're just waiting now, to see what that will look like, but we could choose which way we want to tip.

Social physics. What goes up, must come down. To every action there is an opposite reaction. An object in motion stays in motion. Which one will we choose? And which one will Caitlen Watkins choose for her future?