Suburban School Violence

“If you look back on high school as the happiest days of your life, you got a big fucking problem.”

— Stephen King

Some thoughts about the school-yard shooting in Littleton, Colorado:

It would be good to remember that when it comes to schools, students, and shootings, throughout the 1980s and much of the 90s, “violence in urban schools” was the bugaboo in the mass media. The violence, episodes which pale in comparison to the Colorado tragedy, was reported at such a frenzied level and with so racist undertones, that the wee “threat” of “violence in urban schools” led to violations of student's rights with searches and detentions and the placing of armed guards in schools. The scare mongering also helped fuel white flight to the suburbs, breeding ground for school-yard massacres.

From Springfield, Oregon, home of school-yard killer Kip Kinkle, to last month's Littleton shoot-'em-up, suburbia is the rot from which such violence, such White violence, occurs. Only in the minds of real estate agents and hopeful parents does a bucolic suburban paradise exist, one where children run free and unmolested, flowers bloom on command, and crime is but a thing that “those people” do. Ask anyone who has survived the boring, mind-numbing conformity of a place like Littleton; ask any kid forced to grow up in one of these soulless, sprawling “neighborhoods,” what they think of their experience, if they ever wanted to kill or maim or at least burn the place to the ground? A good portion will say, “Yes.”

I grew up in the Sacramento suburbs of College Greens and Rancho Cordova. I didn't kill anyone but I certainly was a “bad” kid. I shoplifted, vandalized, broke into homes, joy-rode stolen cars, helped construct pipe bombs, blew stuff up for kicks, and various other things that could have gotten myself or others killed. I met up with the authorities three times: Once of shoplifting, once for transporting a case of beer on my bike, and once for disrupting a boy scout assembly. I was never one of those people who your parents told you not to hang out with, because I was well-spoken, polite to adults, and got good grades. I was also smaller and weaker than my peers, constantly harassed for being a “lamo.” In high school, I went from “lamo” to punk rocker. As being a punker was not “cool” in 1980, I was threatened and assaulted by jocks and longhairs (aka stoners, heshers, burnouts…). In my defense, I would “act crazy,” yelling things like “I know where you live! I'm gonna cut yer head off while you sleep!” to my tormentors, defense mechanisms that could have gotten me sent to a shrink or hauled off to some re-education camp in Utah. Eventually, the bullies left me alone. If I was Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris, I might have amassed a misfit army and assaulted my school.

Racism and homo-hatred were also very prevalent in my neighborhood. It wasn't until the mid-1980s, after I had graduated high school, that my grade school was forced by court order to integrate. Yes, that's right, a school in suburban Sacramento, California, forced by court order to integrate. This lily-white paradise fostered a conformist racism among me and my friends. Without much thought, we would write “KKK” or “Kill Niggers” on our school notebooks. Knowing nothing about history, we would choose our favorite Nazi leader. We would carve swastikas on park benches. In junior high, I somehow came across and liked a 45 rpm record by the funk band Parliament, which I hid from my friends lest they think me a “nigger lover."

Worse than being a “nigger lover” was to be a fag. Those boys who were effeminate were picked on and ostracized, even by those of us who were the victims of other's torment. To show any kind of affection to another male was strictly forbidden. Camaraderie, however, especially in tormenting fags or getting girls drunk and “pulling a train” on them, something I didn't do but witnessed more than once, was encouraged. Where this code of stupidity, violence, and cruelty came from is pretty obvious to me. We were not born bad but pretty much adapted ourselves to a pecking order that was already there and that demanded we succeed at any cost. We were also bored out of our skulls and raging with hormones. The anti-social behavior was a way to entertain ourselves while letting out energy. Punk rock, which was mischievous on the surface and certainly energetic, gave me and my friends a focus. It is ironic to note that what kept us from tearing up our neighborhoods was, at the time, under attack by Christers and cops as being a bad influence and destructive to society.

Where were our parents during all this? Probably doing pretty much what your parents were doing and what the parents of Kip Kinkle and the two shooters of Littleton were doing: Going to church, PTA meetings, work. They were watching football on Sundays after mowing the lawn on Saturday. They were coaching Little League teams and leading Girl Scout troops. My parents were very racially hip and encouraged me and my brother to make friends with Black kids. They taught us that everyone was born equal and deserved a fair chance regardless of skin color or religion or ethnicity. My parents raised both their sons to deal with problems using reason instead of violence, that violence never solves anything. My parents were, and are, good people. So were my friends’. But we were in a bad place.

So think of that when the pundits start throwing around words like “Goth” or phrases like “Trench Coat Mafia.” Think of the deadening monotony of suburbia. Think of rows and rows of faceless tract houses, with nice lawns and quiet streets and fences and gates and guards and no opportunity for dissent. Think of the boredom we subject our kids to and then think of all the restrictions — curfew laws, school searches, parental warnings on everything — we put on them. Think of forever pressing down on something until it explodes. Think of these things and then make your judgment about the Littleton shooters. At least they had the good manners to kill themselves after their act of horror. Our Commander in Chief — directly responsible for thousands of deaths in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, and now Serbia — can't even muster an apology.

Though I came from a broken home, from a mother who worked low-paying food service jobs to support herself and two kids and gave her kids little supervision but lots of life skills, a mother whose mother died a DT-tortured, alcoholic; as I did not come from a family that would ever be considered spokespeople for “Family Values,” I have yet to take out 13 people and myself because I don't feel like I fit in. Masters Harris and Klebold came from “respectable,” middle-class families. Papa Harris is retired military, while Mama is a gourmet food specialist. Daddy Klebold is a geophysicist, Momma works with the disabled. All are god-fearing, church-attending Christians; all fine candidates for “Family Values” posterpeople. Harris and Klebold's final actions are now well known. (I must note that my description of my “rowdy” years and of the struggle that my mom had in raising two kids while making shit wages is not intended to be an indictment of my mom. She is a very smart and caring person, who knew enough to instill in her sons a sense of morality that has absolutely nothing to do with church, state, or commerce, and to give us the skills to face life and deal with it. In my book, she's great. Now to ask her about co- signing this loan…)

I would say that the deadpanned amazement of newscasters and pundits to the revelation that jocks pick on weaker people would be a surprise if it wasn't true that many of these same talking heads were the jocks, prom queens, and other popular folk in high school, the bully elite that every nerd and geek had to deal with. That the incredibly dense haven't picked up on the glorification of the jock and the competitiveness and violence within jock culture only speaks to the divide between this pampered, privileged group and those they pick on. This dynamic doesn't stop when a person graduates from high school. One needs to look no further than popular culture to see the elevation of the slim, trim, and hardbodied and the vilification of those who don't pass the ever-tightening fitness test. My friends, we do have a Spartan class of warriors, a physical elite reminiscent of Himmler's SS, sans race, and those who don't fit in are painfully aware of it. That some kids in Colorado cracked under the boot of their bully-boy peers just adds to the explanation for Colorado's tragedy.

When it comes down to it, I think the early Twentieth-Century anarchist, Voltarine de Cleyre had it right. In desperate times, desperate people act desperately. And, of course, Harris and Klebold were a bit screwy in the head.

Perhaps the worst thing about the Littleton shootings is the incredible amount of stupidity that is drooling over the airwaves. “Trench coats! Eeek! A trench coat.” Like someone who dons one turns into a blood lusting ghoul. Give me a break: if trench coats were the root of all evil then why are the most popular among those who flock to Wall Street and Pennsylvania Ave.?

The scapegoat jumped from trench coats to Goths, an obscure, suburban, youth subculture that worships frailty, defeat, and androgyny. What an army! A gaggle of depressed, skinny kids who would break their goddamn wrists if they ever fired a gun.

Now the pop star, Marilyn Manson, is the villain, the cause of the downfall of Western Civilization. Forget the fact that his critics have never listened to his music or ever heard him interviewed (an intelligent guy, he), still they flock to city council meetings slobbering over the microphone, “Puh-leeese, Sir, do what you can to keep this devil out of our community. We don't wah-wah-wah-na see aw children die like those kids in Coworado.” This from some old, white Christer man in Fresno, trying to keep today's Alice Cooper from playing in his town. This attack on freedom of speech from some Vet who marches every Memorial Day to celebrate the defense of our “nation's freedoms.” This cry for morality from some creep who would, if he could get away with it, incinerate every queer he could get his hands on, line up against the wall every Mexican he could find who is not cleaning his house or mowing his lawn. Manson canceled the last gasp of his tour through the Western States as death threat after death threat rolled in. This is the Christian Jihad, folks; fundamentalists every bit as authoritarian and perverse as the Ayatollah Khomeni ever was.

Witness Utah's Senator Orin Hatch waving around a Marilyn Manson CD, yelling about morality. Put it out of your little heads that the man hales from a state whose religion, until a few years ago, had a White Heaven and a Black Heaven, a man who never met an arms manufacturer or brutal, Western-allied dictator that he did like.

The danger of the hysteria surrounding the Littleton shootings is, of course, the plethora of laws that will be passed to soothe the souls of conservatives and liberals alike. For the liberals, more anti-gun laws will be passed, with blindness to the fact that it is harder for a kid, for anyone, to get a gun today then it was 60 years ago, when almost every young boy had his own hunting rifle. (He also knew how dangerous it was, how to use it, etc.). The conservatives will push for more school uniforms, curfews, and cops on campus. (Too bad we can't handcuff the little buggers straight out of the womb.) The Christers will call for more Christ, as if history hasn't proven that more Christ means more violence (The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Witch Burnings, Queer Bashing, Clinic Bombings, etc.) All will clamor for more censorship of the internet, music, and video games.

Nowhere in this hodgepodge of authoritarianism and irrationality will anyone mention that violence begets violence and that violence perpetuated and sanctioned by the state — war, police brutality, capital punishment — always comes back in the form of more violence in our everyday lives. It is not the images that we see or the music that we hear that causes the chaos. If it was them, as Alexander Cockburn points out (AVA, April 28), Japan, with its “blood- soaked…round-the-clock” depictions of violence on TV and in film, would be a bastion of brutality. Instead, “the level of social violence in Japanese society is exceptionally low.” The difference between Japan and the US is not in the images and sounds fed to us but in the fact that, unlike the US, Japan has not fought an aggressive war in over 50 years, nor does it have an urban police force that will beat the shit out of its citizens at the slightest provocation. Rid America of violent media and replace it with 24-hours of Tele-Tubbies, and, though we all might “go Gay,” we would still be hacking at each other.

Also never mentioned is the fact that adults kill far more people, far more children, than children kill either children or adults.

You want solutions? How about eliminating state-sanctioned violence? Only when the system we live in abandons violence as a legitimate tool of governance will we be able to limit the violence that we see all around us. Yeah, that's tough but it needs to be done.

We also might try raising our kids with values that have nothing, nada, never a thing to do with the marketplace, the state, or the military. Let's try raising kids under the rubric of cooperation rather than cut-throat competition. Let's teach them practical things like how to take care of themselves. You know, simple things, how to use a needle and thread, how to grow a plant, etc. Here's a novel thought! Why don't we teach them to think critically. While we are doing this why don't we give them the freedom to discover what works for them. Let them break their arm falling from a tree and don't sue whoever owns the property the tree is on. Give them the freedom to “be weird” or to fuck-up. That's how people grow and learn to handle adversity. Forget the school shrinks and counselors coming along after the fact to reconstruct people who should have the tools to cope with tragedy, freedom, etc. before crisis strikes. In short, let’s stop treating kids like they are, on one hand, little demons that need to be punished and controlled, and, on the other, frail angels that need to be pampered and protected. They are people, ferkristsake, treat them that way!