bedroom the handyman carolyn see bathroom smoke and mirrors neil gaiman car/walk the stillest day josephine hart
office up r.e.m. car breakheart hill [book-on-tape] thomas h cook living room the sci fi channel
brand x the message came from out of the blue: Brand X welcomes you into its clutches.
1999 april 27
the abdication of personal responsibility
it's been a week since two sociopaths went on a rampage in littleton, colorado.
on a no-man-is-an-island level, i feel for the families of both victims and perpetrators, the community, the kids who survived. on a more personal level, i am horrified, as i always am by senseless death, but to be perfectly honest, i shudder as much at the site of a dead cat on the side of the road as i do at the photo montages the media has been feeding me on a daily basis. truth be told, it hasn't changed me that much, if at all.
more truth: the blame laying is about to make me lose the sympathies i may have been feeling.
it is a seemingly natural reaction for we as a society, and even as individuals, to want to know why, just so long as the why is not "because i felt like it" or "i wanted to" or "why not." someone, some thing must be to blame. so we have people up in arms over video games, over movies like the matrix and the basketball diaries [although jim carroll seems to be off the hook for writing the book; i suppose poet/punks don't have enough money to bother about] and over the goth movement which has been senselessly expanded to include marilyn manson who is about as goth as the gap.
there is blame assigned to the parents, the school and the classmates. those most likely have more basis in reality, although they are not the be-all and end-all of it. the blame lies with the two boychildren who decided it would be cool to kill people, to blow up their school and to hijack a plane and crash it into new york city. i find it sadly amusing that the same people who didn't see a problem coming when these kids made a video about shooting classmates, who thought that could never happen in the real world, are now so retroactively concerned about the ridiculous fantasy of hijacking a 747 and taking out the empire state building.
i don't remember where i first heard the phrase abdication of personal responsibility; i'm sure i must have heard it somewhere because i am not so lyrical as to have coined it myself. but the minute i heard it, i knew it to be truth: it's not my fault has become the mantra of our society.
i don't know how to fix it, but i tend to agree with those who say it must begin at home and in the community. my parents are not rabid anti-gun nuts, nor do they own guns, but it was made clear to us at an early age that guns killed people and killed them dead. we were taught it is better to walk away than to hit, that words can indeed hurt us and hurt us badly, but that words could also be used as a weapon of retaliation with an effect on the teenage psyche just about unrivaled. sure, it isn't very nice to make someone bleed from the ears by verbally flaying them, but it is infinitely better than shooting them in the head. and pretty damn satisfying to boot. but most of all, we were taught that we were responsible for our own actions and any subsequent consequences.
all my friends can relate to the fantasies these boys had about getting revenge upon their classmates; i don't think there is a teenager who makes it through high school unscathed, although in my world, junior high was even more brutal. but not a one ever thought about acting these fantasies out. there is nothing wrong with fantasy, it is a fantastic coping device and a wonderful time killer to boot. but people who get so wrapped up in them, and take steps to make them real, are dysfunctional and it doesn't matter how many nonviolent video games they play, how many g-rated movies they see, how many hours they spend in church: at some point they make the conscious decision to act, and act they do.
it's not my fault those boys went on a killing spree. it's theirs.
stepping off her soapbox, claire
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