ThunderSandwich.Com TS#11 -The Columbine Curse by Charles Plymell

The Columbine Curse

After the tragedy, I watched many of the talked shows that searched for answers. My son, just out of high school watched some of them with me. We listened to all the soul-searching responses (values, TV, parental guidance, etc.), but became frustrated when some of the obvious causes, remote or immediate were never mentioned. The programs continued, and essays began to appear. The first one presenting some clues to the was one written by Lakis Polycarpol titled: The silent killers: suburban sameness, isolation, ennui," which began to examine the environmental effects that have been obvious to many who have been sensitive to the gradual subliminal changes, since, say about 1984. Has the world gone crazier lately. Perhaps so, but the change has been so subliminal and incremental and as cliche as the question, (multiplicity, exponentiality).

There are plenty of causes, with great stretches of proximity to assign, to discuss more fully. But there was one that was so obvious to us, we shook our heads in disbelief that none of the people suggested it. That is the failure of the school system itself. When writing on the subject of systems, I always begin by quoting the great definition of Arthur Koestler: "Marxism, like orthodox Freudianism, like Catholicism, is a closed system. By a ‘closed system’ I mean, firstly, a universal method of thought which claims to explain all phenomena under the sun and to have a cure for all that ails man. It is, further, a system that refuses to be modified by newly observed facts but has sufficiently elastic defences to neutralise their impact–that is, to make them fit the required pattern by a highly developed technique of casuistry. It is, thirdly, a system which once you have stepped inside its magic circle, deprives your critical faculties of any ground to stand on." (from Arrow in Blue) As anyone knows who has gone to school board meetings and who have had the Board and Administration flee to their "Executive Sessions" instead of answer questions directly, this definition can be aptly applied both broadly and narrowly. I am not universally blaming schools and teachers; in fact, I am amazed and delighted to see young people achieve so much. Even watching them command the technology of our armed forces amazes me. I feel incompetent by their achievements. Still, blaming schools and teachers would be like violating a sacred trust.

Later, I will offer a profile of what it was like parenting two of my own achievers through those trying years. To compliments people offer me about my own children, I say wryly that I set such a poor example, they didn’t want to turn out like me. There is some truth to it. I dropped out after my freshman year. I later went to college and taught for over thirty years in college and in some special programs in grade schools and high schools. Though I taught varied courses and could have chosen a variety of official professorial titles, I used that of a tutor, one post that I was filling just before retirement. Towards the end of my teaching career, I was more fulfilled offering one-on-one help than in a lecture course. But I was somewhat saddened when my son and his friends discussed the article, and mentioned in a sour moment, when I was advocating doing away with a failed system, that I wasn’t even a professor.

Education is still the hallowed ground for class struggle. I told my students, that even though I was a dropout, it is still the only game in town. That notion has gained new dimensions in recent social history and no one lets young people forget it. Never mind that a degree from a state college may not be worth, at least in economic terms, a debt of $50,000, or whatever the stats are nowadays, put upon the youth. Times are good now, but that wasn’t always the case, and times can change again. This begs the other question: What is there now for those who do not chose to be indebted to a system that can be as idiotic as some of those who in it, profess their disciplines. One of the reasons I retired was due to the horror stories in education that I saw each day. In many academic environments as they were called, someone who felt compelled to examine his or her world, past or present, or obtain useful empirical knowledge could hardly excel. More likely they were beaten down since about the third grade.

Another recent tragedy in our small village haunted me until I had to have my say. Enough of the hollow reporters on PBS and other stations asking the same old questions. He was a good kid. Everyone liked him. I remember his constant smile. I miss it. His last job was with the village crew cleaning the gutters, looking up and greeting me cheerfully. He had a lot of problems, I guess. Not unlike the problems that the professional class in our village have. His counselors, perhaps. His principal. They were among the ones at his funeral. They are the ones the villagers pay health benefits for for the rest of their lives. They are the ones who can seek professional help. There are plenty of programs available to them that we pay for. But no programs filter down to my high school friend. He had lots of friends, though. But if there were any programs at the school that might of trickled down to him, they too would have gone to those, who, you know, play the game. The names of people established in the town, etc. What really haunts me is that I heard through one of the kids that he said his girl friend was going off to college. All the incentives seemed to have fallen her way. He said she’d go to college, meet someone there and hook into that old myth of the American dream. His counselors would have a name for it. "Self esteem" or the going euphemism. But how many are there who don’t fit, or don’t want to fit the system. More than you think, I’d bet. And what do they do if they don’t play the game. What happens to good kids who just want to be good kids? There are no programs for kids like J., but there are plenty of programs for their principals, their teachers, their counselors, their coaches, their janitors, if they have problems.

Then on one of the talk shows I heard a baby boomer say at a round table discussion on the Columbine tragedy that "nothing has ever happened like that before." I started searching my memory for the year I was in my only year in high school. I think it was 1950. I remember the account in the paper out in Texas and I also heard it on the radio. Some teenager had just shot to death a number of his friends. I think it was three. There was no explanation. I remember the west Texas Sheriffs accent so clearly, "You jest can’t take people out there and shot ‘em like rabbits." And then there was Charlie Starkweather, though he was older, who ought to have known better. Then there was the cannibal and on and on. But back to school and the "recent" past. While my son was in high school, a well-liked basketball player took a baseball bat and killed an old man. A year before that another popular high-school kid from a nearby village killed his parents and took their car and his girlfriend and left town, thinking, I guess, that they would not leave a trail. And one of my son’s friends bought a motorcycle the day school was out and rode it as fast as he could and killed himself against a road sign. Maybe there was too much pressure. Maybe those summer days in the stench of school was just too much pressure. Maybe the principal reprimanded him for wearing his cap in school too many times. Maybe some girls who seem to keep their emotions in control were showing them off enough. Maybe, maybe, and on and on. Let’s look at some possible real cause.

Columbine has been happening incrementally, exponentially, There’s just more of us, there’s not enough solutions, there’s no values they say, no morals. What do those words mean in this day and age. Same as the past? No. The semantic referent has been diluted, so there’s not reason to use those words. Forget high school. Let’s go to grade school. Want to talk about morals. How about sex? No one knows what happens when, what should happen when. We, as a society, haven’t the slightest idea of what to do, or what is going on. We do know this. Sex is a very powerful emotion. It should not be confused with guns. What about the six-year old recently? Why did he shoot that girl? Probably because she was a girl. And probably because he had a gun easily available. And probably because he was abused, but no one wants to talk about that. Sexually. I don’t think we want to know the stats on that one. I bet they were buggering that kid.

I once taught a course at a prison. A sex offender wrote his case histories for me. Just in the section from Albany to Newburgh there were more offenses, especially dealing with welfare children, than anyone could imagine. His testimony showed that there was as much deviant behavior involving minors going on that it is wasn’t even a subculture. It was as large as any other cultural spectrum. If one wanted to list the Church, Boy Scouts, the military or any other category, one could estimate at least a good thirty percent of the population as sexually deviant, just involving minors. And there is only a legal age. A real age for any moral definition is quite arbitrary. People don’t really want to try to solve those questions culturally.

Old moralities and values that our brains were accustomed to in the traditional mores have gradually changed. We are not the same civilization. Our brain chemistry has changed. Older brains retain some of what we thought were values we knew, but younger brains have different chemistries. The air itself has chemicals that affect the newer brains. Not to mention the water or other ingested toxins. We have metamorphosed, or evolved, or mutated if you like, into a different human being. I have seen the change. The external environment has shaped us as we internalized the chemistry. I’m sure Dr. Skinner would recognize the impact on his hometown of Scranton, Pa. There are many local environments that are toxic zones where people are markedly mentally and physically damaged. It has little to do with the curriculum or the dogma that has been applied to the last century.

Children are pulled out of the home too early before they can have the joy of their childhood discoveries. The are put in a huge unhealthy machine which lumbers down the road. I see their Chagall-like faces looking out the windows of the bus. Many of them are sick and will go into a sick building. There, throughout their formative years, they will face the bullies of our society who will always make them pay in one way or another. The teacher’s pets. The kids from a family not "respectable," but one accepted in the community.

Meanwhile their brains form with lack of good oxygen produced by those bullies who grew up thinking that the planet was put here for them to use up. There is entertainment for all of them, from garden tractor pulls at the local fair to power skis on our polluted waterways. No one considers that it will never work, that we are creating death. Except for some of the innocent. There are no values because everything important has no value. We are not at the end of our evolution. We are at the stage that we can recreate ourselves through technology.

We used to have faith-based systems. They will become the strongholds for self- righteousness in the religious armies. For there is no need for faith. It has been lost in the brain evolutionary chemistry. Faith was based on the belief that there was something on the other side. Just around the bend. Faith was the only thing one could have deep down because we are born into an unanswerable question. That realization strikes everyone who pauses to think about it with a little horror. When one begins to think. Sometime I won’t be here. Where will I be? The end cannot be conceived.

Everyone fears this to some degree. That psychological fear has a direct impact on how one exits. Most people transfer it to a faith-based situation and go on. But it always shows up. In competition. In villein innocent creatures. In a number of ways the frightened individual wants someone or something to take his or her place, as if to delay the end. They say war is territorial. Perhaps it is only psychological.

Society cannot know what to do with this. There may be internal religious wars before we can clone our way out of it. We are embarking on the capacity to recreate ourselves. But probably not without a fight. The killing goes on in an alien environment in an alien mind. The landscape of Columbine would probably be better off rendered back to nature. And the next presidency might even be endangered by virtual reality. Bullies never seem to go away. They act as if they are scared to death of death.