Behind the Connecticut Massacre

From CounterPunch:

Each time there is an outbreak of homicidal mania, whether Columbine, Virginia Tech, or Adam Lanza’s slaughter of twenty eight innocents in Connecticut, the media directs us to stories about gun control and the need for better policing of individuals with mental illnesses.

The larger context—that America is a society brimming over with violence—is entirely lost in the discussion.

More here.

The shooting at Newtown reminded me of Columbine.  Not the Columbine shooting itself so much as my reaction to it.  It was my first year teaching in a high school not too terribly different from the one Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up in 1998.  At first, it was another news story to me, horrible and tragic, to be sure, but just another story of incomprehensible violence among many.  Then, as the ominous security crackdown and accompanying oppression of goths and other black-wearing misfits became apparent, it started to piss me off, at both the killers and America's moronic reaction to it.  

A couple of days later, however, it hit me.

I was listening to an NPR piece late that afternoon after getting home from school.  The reporter simply read a list of the names of all the dead, with maybe a bit of bio included--I don't really remember.  But it hit me hard, and I started crying.  I had to stop what I was doing and just sit for a few minutes.  These kids were just like my kids, instantly and horribly snuffed out in a protracted instance of senseless violence.  As I listened to the names, I saw my students' faces in my mind.  It was just horrible.  And I kept crying.

Little did I realize that it was just the warmup act for 9/11 only a few years later.

Again, the same thing, albeit magnified beyond anything I could have imagined at that point.  Senseless violence, followed by a militant response from the public and government institutions, complete with oppression and bullying of people who simply looked like the killers.  All paving the way for our own acts of unspeakable violence which would dwarf the actual terrorist attack itself many times over.  And in the middle of it all were thousands of dead innocents who didn't have to die.  And we're still killing in the name of 9/11 even as I write these words.

My sadness about Columbine, 9/11 and our response to it, and Newtown, and so many other deadly national failures can't simply be grief about people dying.  After all, as Butthole Surfers once sang, strangers die everyday.  For me, and maybe for you, too, it's about something else.  I think I grieve for our sick society.  I think I'm sad because we don't really value life in the US.  I mean, okay, you can say it's a violent world, and you'd be right about that, but it seems that all too often we, as a people, as Americans, run toward the darkness, embracing it, expanding it, celebrating it, rather than doing everything we can to minimize it.  That is, there's a difference between the darker aspects of human nature and an overall culture that celebrates those aspects.

And we do celebrate the darkness.  On television.  In sports.  In music.  In church.  Our national anthem is a hymn to war.  Our economic prosperity is based on brutal African slavery and genocide of the Native American population.  We torture now, as official US policy, and a majority of us approve.  In this context, it's amazing there aren't more Columbines and Newtowns.  Actually, increasingly, there are more.  And a lot of us want to take shots at the killers, ourselves, to satisfy our lust for vengeance.  Or just because we like violence and want suitable victims who won't trouble our consciences.  For what they are.

I think this now seemingly endless stream of massacres makes me sad for America.  Because, apparently, this is what we're about.  This is what we've always been about.



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