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Carnage comes to the
windswept hills of Colorado, and a nation stands mesmerized by a horror that is
but a mirror of all that truly is America, reflected from the hairless faces of
boys, their faces marred into the permanent, scowling grimace of hatred.
Predictably, the carnage at Columbine High School has elicited howls of searing
grief, as well as the questions that, by now, have more rhetoric in them than
reason.
How ? Why ? How could
this happen—here ?
And implicit in the
questioning, lies the barely shrouded suggestion that these kinds of events are
meant to happen in the inner cities of the damned, where all else of little
value is purged and partitioned, but not here! In an age when the poor are
damned to the permanence of squalor, and when millions grow like bubbles on the
edge of a rolling brook, there is a social acceptance of loss, of death, of
poverty’s grip on the psyche.
But things do not
occur as they are supposed to occur, and consciousness does not easily lie
within closed doors of social class. In contemporary society, consciousness
passes through barriers, walls, and ages, and nothing pervades the national
consciousness as much as the ubiquity of violence.
We live in a nation
which was weaned on the mother’s milk of dark and bitter violence, and of an
ethnic cleansing that was a pattern of those to come. We live on land fed by
Indian and African blood, sweat and tears, and white-washed away as if it never
really happened. We live in a nation that is bombing civilians with joyous
alacrity, all the while crowing, "collateral damage"; "collateral damage," as if
these words justify the killing of innocents on a bus, or in a house who are
guilty of nothing but being in a country that NATO is determined to pulverize
for imperial interests. It has been fourteen years since the infernal bombing of
the MOVE house in Philadelphia, and to date, not a single killer cop has ever
seen a single charge for the most premeditated of murders against men, women and
babies.
In this nation, young
boys grow up learning that there are several kinds of violence, state violence,
and personal violence; and state violence is okay. Why else would one of the
killers of Columbine have sought, unsuccessfully, to have joined the Marines
several days before the carnage? Unable to participate in the state’s violence,
the boys gleefully engaged in personal violence, and instead of being called a
"hero" for killing the enemy, they are called "killers" for killing their
classmates.
Meanwhile, the
reasons and motivations are ignored, only the acts, as if they stand alone,
inviolate. And, in this age, when images flit across nations at the speed of
light, aren’t motivations important?
They are not
monsters, but boys of an America where legalized violence is bred in the bone.
They are truly America’s children. And they are but a harbinger of what is to
come.
For, are not children
but living reflections of that which is the darkest and brightest of their
parents ? Do they not, like burnished mirrors, reflect all of those who came
before them?
The shooters of
Columbine High School are exemplars of what we have come to call alienated
youth. In that whirlpool of hormonal surges that is the agony of adolescence,
when they stand at the terrible vestibule of becoming nothing, is as frightening
as the fear of failure; the failure of manhood; the absence of potency that is
the very definition of American man. They are at the cusp of completion,
wondering, and fearing that they may not match their dreams.
Man, as projected by
popular American culture and myth, is he who is the destroyer; he who kills.
Denied membership in the club of professional killers (soldiers), they wanted to
prove they were indeed real American men.
The carnage of
Columbine is the direct result.
The real tragedy is
that they are but boys, all-American boys, and there are millions who share
their alienated spirit.
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