Thinking, Phase One
Mar. 23rd, 2005 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThat'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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-24 02:46 pm (UTC)"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.