Thinking, Phase One

[silveradept]

That's right, now that we're officially in spring, it snowed for a good part of today. Needless to say, after my initial displeasure, I simply took it as another of Michigan's quirks, and was able to laugh that it was snowing in Spring. Actual spring up here will be about a week in May, and then we'll go straight into Summer.

Yeah. That good.

Anyway, I've been thinking (always a dangerous thing) about one bit or another - first, on this school-shooting bit, I got a very strong feeling that the newsmedia would love for us persons to draw parallels between Littleton and this latest incident - why else include a one-line blurb about a connection to a neo-nazi website when the people involved are all Native American? And in another blurb, the shooter is reported to have asked a friend whether or not they believed in God, and then shot the responder. My memory may not be great, but that sounds really familiar. I think I've heard it before - Littleton, I believe.

What purpose does this serve? If all you want is a sympathy draw, the incident itself should be more than enough? Are we supposed to believe that all children who go out rampaging like this are interested in White Supremacy? If there are suggestions that the school is at fault somehow, they will be dismissed. After all, even if schoolchildren form themselves into vicious cliques and then do active battle with other cliques for playground supremacy, all well-adjusted children will find a clique to be in, garner support from their comrades and drama from their enemies, and generally participate in the schoolyard battles. They won't go killing their classmates. Even the outcasts are supposed to bond and form their own clique that wages perpetual war against every other clique or absents themselves from the battleground as much as they can. While they may draw support from their clique, most people out on the fringe are quite painfully aware of that fact. In sufficient cases, I'm not surprised they take up arms against their classmates. I still don't condone their violence, but I do understand it.

I'm one of those kids, you know. I have all the markings of being quite capable of killing my classmates with a smile on my face as I exact revenge. I've got the brains to do it, and I could find the means, were my resolve sufficient. I know the ways in, the ways out, and if I just decided on indiscriminate slaughter, I know when to do the most damage. So what stopped me?

One very simple statement that I clung to, since my life (and others') depended on it: High school is not like college or the real world. If you believe that as totally as I did, then you don't riddle your classmates full of bullet holes, because at that point, you work towards transcending it. The jibes still bother you, the exclusion still hurts, but you start actively separating yourself from it, because it's not real, and consequently, not important. Not really important, anyway. People who are in situations where that statement doesn't trump over what's happening to them now are the ones who are likely to turn your school into a graveyard. The kids know who those people are. Do the teachers? The administrators? And more importantly, do they even care?

For my high school, the answers were some, no, and most assuredly not. Now, they might be no, no, and definitely not. I suspect for many high schools, they'll fail on those three questions, no matter what they say about it. And then they look surprised when one of those students decides that things aren't going to get better, and that it's time to make them better - so they're going to take down as many obstacles in their way as they can. Most of these kids understand, I suspect, that once they start, there's no chance they'll live a life outside of prison, and rather than rot away, they take their own lives once they've done all the damage they can.

I could have been one of those kids. I know this, in the very darkness of my soul, that I am capable of the acts described there. I had the fortune of parents and teachers who instilled the bigger picture in me, and a sufficiently intelligent group of friends who were able to go toe-to-toe with me on quite a few issues. They provided sufficient distraction, I suspect, and pleasure that I put up with high school and simply buried myself in my work. Some people don't get the luck that I had. They're the ones who most desperately need it.

Can we fix the problem? Definitely. All it takes is for the outside world to change toward the society it wants to see in the schools. The kids mirror their parents, often to a caricature degree. So all it takes is for the parents to change.

Which is why things will probably only get worse.

Comments

[blacktigr.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with all of these sorts of events is the context.

I heard on NPR that this boy was mercilessly teased about wearing black, being "goth"...whatever. Yeah, that's Not a Reason to Shoot People. But...I could see there being fewer school shootings if there were constraints on the teasing and more acceptance for being different.

Just saying.

[silveradept]

I agree with you on both points. I have limited context myself, so anything you can provide to make things better is always helpful.

I'd like to see more accceptance of difference myself - that way, nobody has reasons to shoot people.

[blacktigr.livejournal.com]

Well, normally what I do when I want the facts is first go to
clickondetroit.com for local news and
www.npr.org for national. Unfortunately, I don't see a full story on the main page of NPR's site right now...so I don't have much to offer.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4557742

It's just that when I was listening to them the other day that I heard the part about him being goth.

[silveradept]

Well, thank you for that information, anyway. As more is unearthed or created for our consumption, we'll find it.

I find it interesting that the police are leaning toward the motive being something to do with the Web Sites, rather than his school and home life. I suspect it takes more than simply a web site to inspire a kid to kill. There has to be something else there, even if it turns out to be mental instability.

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

Well they can arrest a single web site opperator. or at least hound a web site opperator. It's tougher to turn to the community as a whole and say "I hope you're proud of yourselves. Each and every one of you did your best to grind that kid into the dirt ever chance you got cause he didn't fit in."

[silveradept]

Even if that's what the community really needs to have happen to them. I suspect, though, the adage about the messenger will be ignored if someone were to voice that unpopular-yet-true opinion.

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

that way, nobody has reasons to shoot people.

That is just crazy talk! We've discussed this before. How can we conqure the world if we don't shoot people? How can we control all the oil? How can we stamp our boot print on the face of humanity?

[blacktigr.livejournal.com]

Trust me. If I'd had a gun in my "rocks fall, everybody dies" scorched-earth phase...things would have been bad. There are always *reasons* to shoot people, just a little thing called Restraint. ;)

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

That drove me up the wall every time this has happened. That they always peg the kid as a goth, or other wise loner type. They don't focus on the school enviroment, the home enviroment, or any other contributing factors. They don't have to after they find an Ozzie CD in the kids collection. Once they disover the single Marylin Manson disc they halt the search for reasons and start looking for black clothes and band posters.

Never once is the fact that bullying in the school is at a high point, or that in many cases the staff are part of the problem when it comes to excluding and so forth. Nope, it's that darn rock n' roll music! If we had just stopped Elvis, none of this would ever have happened.

grumble...

[silveradept]

Exactly. That precise lack of looking for a real cause is what aggravated me enough to spit forth the whole rant. Those cute little throwaway lines are handwavium at it's finest.

"We don't need to find a cause, just look - he had X. He must have been part of some subculture, Y, and everybody knows that all Y's think about Z (Z being some death or killing-related thing). That's why he did this."

Never mind about what might have driven (or drawn) him to Y. The important part is that he was a Y, and that's the whole justification for his behavior. Pay no attention to the situation behind the curtain.

[starkruzr.livejournal.com]

I think it would also help to have a faculty which is a bit more concerned with the results of their teaching and a bit less uncaring.

EVERYTHING begins with the parents, but if the faculty are totally unwilling to manage the environment, this kind of thing is going to keep happening again and again.

When I was a camp counselor a couple years ago, the kids would tell me again and again about how 9th graders would go around throwing them into garbage cans, beating them with backpacks full of books, and otherwise causing some pretty serious bodily harm. The faculty did nothing.

These were 11-year-old girls.

Something has to be done.

[silveradept]

Much as this looks like exoneration (which it shouldn't be), often times the faculty's hands are tied by those very same parents. The teachers are supposed to instill respect and knowledge, but the parents will be damned before they give the teacher one bit of effective disciplinary authority to make that respect stick.

There are probably a lot of faculty who want to manage the environment, but can't because a parent will complain, and the likely result of that is the teacher's dismissal.

Something has to be done, no doubt. But with that, those people best suited to doing have to be granted the power to act without fear that they will be fired for taking reasonable steps.