Another day, another school shooting. More calls for fervent prayers, far less fervent calls for curbs on firearms, background checks, and so on. The absurd Oliver North, new head of the NRA, blaming the latest deadly shooting on a culture of violence and the use of Ritalin, not the use of firearms.
We all know nothing will be done. It is the same script yet again, with another familiar element, the stereotypical shooter. He wasn’t exactly a loner, but he was apparently lonely and aggrieved. A mother claims her daughter, one of the girls shot, was targeted because the shooter pursued her increasingly aggressively. Until she finally put him down publicly, humiliatingly, and, as it turns out, fatally.
He was also allegedly bullied — not by his peers, though that might also have been true, but by his coaches. It sounds like they dodged a bullet.
High School is hard for many who haven’t got a clique, a circle, a crowd, a posse to hang with. The cools kids are unapproachable. The means kids maltreat the outcasts for sport, increasing their isolation and resentment.
Most such people go on to live their lives. Some are stunted by the experience. Many happily find someplace to fit in, someone willing to befriend them. The loners, losers, outcasts, oddballs discover, if they are lucky, that High School was a temporary purgatory, an institution wth its own weird folkways, but that the harsh hierarchy of their home town High means little in the wider world.
But at the time, the shame, anger, helplessness can seem bottomless and endless. It’s easy to suppose things will never change for the better. In an increasingly atomized country whose social connections are eroding, where community weakens and tribalism reigns, where insiders shun outsiders and loneliness increases, lines from the heartbreaking 1929 Fats Waller/Andy Razaf/Harry Brooks lament of the black man in America still capture the sufferers inner landscape.
“When you are near, they laugh and sneer, set you aside and you’re denied…How sad I am, each day I feel worse…How will it end, ain’t got a friend…What did I do, to be so black and blue?”
Once it ended with graduation or dropping out. Sometimes with counseling or stoic endurance. Even, sometimes, with others befriending the victim and shunning the bully, which requires real courage in a closed world with a rigid pecking order. “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
This sort of nasty interpersonal business once ended with an exchange of harsh words, or blows, of physical pain returned for psychic pain inflicted. You wound up in the principal’s office, in detention, suspended, having a talk with parents, pastor or police. But how it often ends now, unlike in most other developed, allegedly civilized countries, is with those who have been laughed at, scorned, ignored, unfriended reaching for a gun and deciding to get even, to go out in a blaze of glory.
According to profilers, almost all school shooters share depression, anger and rage. They are outcasts in the hot house society of high school with ”difficulty establishing and maintaining friends and social relationships…as a result of that they are either being bullied or are the bullier.”
What to do, since we won’t deny anyone access to a gun or fund adequate mental health resources? We are left with treating our own young people as if they were terrorists. “See Something, Say Something,” looks like a slim reed to rely on to keep our children alive. And a pretty damn sad motto for one’s Alma Mater.
Making schools hardened sites is also not going to be adequately funded or the guards properly trained or sure to stand up to a shooter with nothing to lose. At best, turning schools into armed fortresses is an admission of failure. It only means the shooters will move elsewhere.
From the top down, this society approves and recommends snark and lionizes mean girls and boys. Where do we learn to sneer and bully and look down on others — from Trump, Hannity, talk radio, reality TV, smart-ass, disrespectful celebrities. Mean songs, mean TV, mean politics, mean investment experts on “Squawk Box.” Winners preen and losers are mocked from morn to night. Not to mention the toxic social networks online, and bloody entertainments where the hero or superhero mows down battalions as if life was a shooting gallery and heroism mass murder.
I conclude with an old fuddy duddy’s lament for a vanished world. Start with the loss of noblesse oblige. The well-off used to regard is as a duty to behave well toward the lesser orders, now billionaires use their wealth to trample them underfoot.
People used to be taught manners, which is code for treating others well, even if you think its better than they deserve. Now barbarous vulgarity, ruthless self-regard, acid contempt for others is the mark of power. Are we surprised those who feel powerless do what they have been taught — pick up a gun and start firing?
I say, bring back the wisdom of Elwood P. Dowd, the benign alcoholic with the six foot rabbit in “Harvey,” though I’m afraid it isn’t going to happen.
“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’ – she always called me Elwood – ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
Hopelessly sentimental and naive? Guilty as charged. You prefer, “Woke up this morning, got myself a gun?” Good luck.