It’s Senseless

I remember well the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 that seems to have started the trend.

A few years ago we went to visit our son and toured my old neighborhood. Back when I attended, Santa Monica High School looked almost exactly like the one in the Jughead comics, a sidewalk by the street and a vast lawn leading up to the three story building. But now there’s a ten foot tall fence with razor wire at the top and a gate with an armed guard.

It’s interesting to note that Samohi had not played Centennial High in football for years because of violence after the games but there was no fence or guards. The year I went there they tried again. A lineman got stabbed at the line of scrimmage. But nobody ever imagined a slaughter like Columbine.

The very first thing I thought when I heard the news about Columbine was, “Those guys were acting like the government.” Michael Moore made a movie about it called Bowling for Columbine (2002) and now I’m curious what his take was.

Our government is the violence perpetrator extraordinaire. I find it interesting that a tiny sample like Dylan Kliebold and Eric Harris, out of 330 million people, garner so much attention. That sounds sick, I know. But here we are, proud to support a “Department of War” with the “warrior ethos”. Basically we are puffing out our chests, happy to create thousands of Kliebolds and Harrises, all the while never winning a war since World War II because none of them were necessary except to satisfy blood lust.

We live in a sanitized culture of death, going from infantry to drones to proxy wars where our expendable peons in foreign lands fight and die to support our war culture industry. In Minneapolis our ordinary and peaceful existence burst open like an infection.

I don’t see much hope in reforming the culture of death. Half the country sees an unborn baby as a problem solved with murder and calls it “rights”. Diplomacy is viewed as weakness. Lots of people see a bug and smash it. Why? Farmers now view the soil as a medium to simply hold up plants so they can take up purchased nutrients. What was once a thriving community in that soil is now toast. Mines and trucks and spreaders have replaced God’s beautiful system of interactive life.

Of course some will continue to argue that other countries have fewer  school shootings. Is that because they don’t, for instance, view an impoverished nation like Yemen that has never attacked Americans as a shooting gallery?

Speaking of shooting galleries, “firearms not allowed” is often posted at the entrance to many businesses. What do you think Dylan Kiebold would have done in reaction to a sign like that compared to a sign indicating that employees may be armed? Gun free zones are potential shooting galleries.

In Texas there are 110 school districts where teachers and staff may carry a firearm. There are also non-lethal defense weapons available. These could go a long way toward limiting the damage from these maniacs. But considering they usually kill themselves as well, what else can we do?

Being an omnivore, I’m not strictly pro-life either. The only answer I have is to be social, care about each other, and hope it rubs off.

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