REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE
In less than two weeks we’ll observe the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings.
Much has changed and nothing has changed since then. Despite the well-meaning efforts of many, no practical lessons have been gleaned from the wreckage of innocent lives. The utter farce that was enacted by the Jefferson County Sheriff in "response" to the shootings only demonstrated, for the umpteenth time, that the police are at best a worthless, and at worst a highly dangerous expedient. They are powerless to prevent crimes and they are inept at investigating them. Their efforts cause more harm than good.
I recall standing at the intersection of Bowles and Pierce early in the afternoon of April 20, 1999, screaming at a cop who refused to let parents through the blockade. I was not alone. Any one of the parents there that day would willingly have run into the school building, unarmed, to help rescue stranded students and teachers. Instead, the cops erected their blockades (which they described as "securing the perimeter") and loitered in the parking lot for three hours while a teacher bled to death and while one student with a critical head wound, had to crawl out a shattered second storey library window in order to save his own ebbing life. Occasionally these "public servants" would cringe behind a slowly moving fire truck past blasted out windows, but they needn’t have worried about their precious necks - the killers had committed suicide within a half hour of committing their massacre.
It came as a shock to many to learn, via the courts, that the police are under no obligation whatsoever to protect citizens from violent criminals. Which makes them liars when they tattoo their squad cars with promises to the contrary. "To serve and protect." What a joke. They serve their own selfish interests and protect one another, especially when one of them falls under the lens of public scrutiny for beating his wife, or for shooting an unarmed "suspect."
Within the past few weeks, as well as at various points in the intervening years since Columbine, other desperate shooters have walked into buildings armed to the teeth and proceeded to gun down the defenseless. I wish it were otherwise. I wish I could report that the tragedy that befell my daughter’s high school ten years ago had caused people everywhere to think deeply about the problems of violence and bullying.
But there remains one disturbing element to all of this. A week before he and Dylan Klebold executed thirteen other people in cold blood, Eric Harris is reported to have remarked wistfully that he wished he could go to Kosovo, so he "could kill a lot of people." Readers of this blog will recall that at that moment in history, a war was raging in the Balkans. The United States military, as a matter of fact, had just recently bombed a passenger train and had blown up a Chinese Embassy building in attacks that were later brushed off cynically as "collateral damage."
And I wonder: with this kind of callous insensitivity to the value of human life - blasting the guts out of unarmed non-combatants and coming up with no better apology than something to the effect that it was all a "regrettable mistake," what are two bright but very angry students in far away Littleton Colorado to make of it?
I recall feeling almost a sense of relief when September 11, 2001 rolled around and finally, the story of Columbine was eclipsed by something even more horrific, offering the citizens of my community a respite from nearly a year and a half of invasive reporting and raw, festering wounds.
And then the most terrible of ironies occurred.
It is a well established fact that bullies everywhere torment victims who are weaker, and unable to defend themselves. "Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size," we are tempted to admonish them.
In the months following the 9/11 attacks, there was much braying and posturing and the President himself promised to "surround" bin Laden, "smoke ‘im out," and "bring ‘im to justice." But then the project stalled - it became apparent that Osama bin Laden was far too wily, far too popular, and far too powerful to fall to the kind of rock pulverizing detonations that distinguish the American military arts.
The 9/11 attacks were themselves no isolated occurrence - they were an act of vengeance that followed over five decades of bullying and harassment of Arab Palestinians. An ongoing harassment of people whose homes and farms were stolen from them to be handed over to a pitiful gang of Jews in 1948.
Sometime in 2002, it became apparent to the American government that hunting down and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice was an effort not likely to bear fruit. Attention was turned to an easier target. Bullies always prefer easier targets. Evidence was manufactured - cooked up - to suggest that the sitting duck nation of Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and that its leader had developed dreaded "weapons of mass destruction" which were even then being targeted at cities in Europe. Iraq was a safe target, having been crippled by over ten years of economic sanction that had left as many as one million innocent children dead - starved as a consequence of a protracted U.S. embargo.
The killings we learn about periodically - where a single shooter walks into a school, or a nursing home, or a church and guns down a dozen or so victims - are terrible events. But in the larger scheme of things, they are trifling matters. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, predicated on a lie, resulted in the deaths of over one million civilians.
With bullying on these larger scales - the invasion of Iraq, they Jewish-led invasion of Gaza and the bombing of hospitals and the employment of captured Palestinian children as human shields - is it any wonder that a few sick, frustrated, powerless and desperate losers will occasionally pick up a gun and ape their own government?
Yes, bullying is a problem. But before we can ever hope to quell it in schools or in neighborhoods, we must acquire the honesty to identify and denounce the far more insidious and lethal form of bullying that occurs between nations under cover of "national security."