... maybe it was all starting then ...
May 21, 1999
5:25 a.m.
When I was in high school, a teacher was beaten to within a hair of her life. She walked in on a drug deal after school hours one day, and paid for it with a barrage of fists and kicks that put a bloodclot in her thigh. She didn't die, though. Nobody died through the violence of another person at my school.  While I was at one of our school's games, a kid in the concession line next to me was stabbed by (as I remember it) one of his girlfriend's ex-boyfriends. There were drugs about anywhere, and an occasional bout with alcoholism. One guy got drunk and killed himself in a car crash right before graduation. We also once had a "race riot" that consisted of a bunch of kids cutting class and running around the school campus--I remember being scared, but hiding it fairly well as I watched from the relative safety of a second floor window. All, in all, my high school was a social learning process as much as an academic one. But, my education was pretty decent. It certainly carried me through the first year of college. For longer than I have lived, there have been guns. And for longer than I have lived, there have been schools. But to my memory, there was never a problem with guns in schools. Even attending a public, inner-city high school, where the influence of a gang or two could be felt--but admittedly wasn't a real presence, I never walked down the hallways fearful that one of my classmates might open fire any minute. Cheryl Wheeler's song "I'd take away the guns" is a moving piece of art. It touches me with a heartfelt message that is strong and deeply provoking. Steven Leigh wrote a piece that I can't argue with in the slightest, wherein he argues that it wouldn't have happened if there weren't guns. I'm not against gun control. Truth be told, I'm actually a bit afraid of guns--primarily because I'm not schooled in how to use one. But ... Here's the problem. The school shootings that are happening these days don't appear to me to be knee-jerk fits of rage. They aren't a matter of someone running off to get hold of a gun, and then firing off a dozen shots before they cool down. Columbine wasn't a case of two kids getting into a squabble, and going off the deep end. Columbine was about a ruthlessly planned attack that included automatic assault weapons, explosives, and suicide. I'm pretty convinced that taking away the guns wouldn't have stopped these two kids because they would have found ways to get them. Now we have Conyers. Another case of a kid with lots of time to think--apparently his girlfriend dumped him, and he felt he had no reason to live. This isn't a sudden burst of anger. This is a calculated, decided-upon course of action. The kid rode on the school bus with weapons in tote, waiting until "the right moment" to open fire. But, I'll admit it's one of those that's closer to borderline. Maybe taking away the guns might have prevented this shooting, maybe not. I'm not sure. Everything in this thing is so situational. I'm not against taking away the guns, you see. But when it comes as a way to stop violence in the schools, I'm not for taking them away, either. What I am is convinced that the issue of guns and their access is really just cloud cover for whatever is causing teenagers to decide to blow each other away in the first place. All the hand-gun rhetoric in Washington, D. C. these days is just politicians playing popularity games and one-upsmanship. Let's not mistake it for anything else. According to a news article I read somewhere, there have been seven incidents in the past two years. As the father of a ten-year-old daughter, I'm really struggling with this. I'm struggling because I don't understand. I am thirty-eight years old. I graduated from high school twenty years ago. Something has changed in that time. Something drastic and profound. That something is not the availability of guns. They were available back then. Nor is it the availability of drugs-I could have gotten anything I wanted in the hallways between classes. It's not the advent of shocking rockers, after all, we had a bit of that if you want to count the Alice Coopers and KISSes (but, to be reasonable, both of those had a campy sense of comic-bookish theatre that overrode any feel of seriousness that might have colored their "bloodiness"). We had Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper," and all sorts of controversial influences. It's not that there weren't fits of anger in the kids. We had fights every week in my high school. I'm not going to get on a band wagon here. I have no sudden agenda. I'm not one of those that thinks we've got to have the Ten Commandments on the wall. I've played tons of role playing games, I love the internet, and remember what it was like to "get" MTV rather than VH-1. Like I say, I'm struggling because I just don't understand. And I'm struggling because the problem feels huge to me. It feels like we're inside a dome of cellophane, and a thousand tons of water is crashing down on us and we're going to suffocate in a slow, spiraling death. What I fear is that the song I mentioned before is right. "I'd take away the guns," lists off a bunch of issues that are being debated at some level in the national consciousness. What I fear is that it's all of those things. That it's TV, and movies, and parents, and teachers, and homework, and discipline, and a lack of spirituality, and drugs, and the internet, and role playing games, and the economy, and advertisements, and the five-second cuts of MTV, and the attention span, and the ritalin, and the overall fast-paced complexity of life today that are all mixing together and morphing to create a new situation . . . ... a situation where the rules are changing and where nothing is stable. And I'm looking forward four years with a sense of desperate fear building inside my mind. Four years. Four, very, very short years before Lisa and I pack our fresh-cheeked, intelligent, delightfully humerous daughter off to high school. I'm struggling too, you see, because because I don't know what to do.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"...to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Princilpes, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and happiness." Representatives of the United States of America Declaration of Independence |
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