Listening to the Monsters
by Giulianna LamannaIt’s estimated that, since the days of my youth, depression among children has increased by 1000% and teen suicide by 300%. Since 1997, classroom-assassins have killed two in Mississippi, three in Kentucky, five in Arkansas, and thirteen in Colorado. Make a graph of these numbers and watch them go exponential in years to come—unless we start giving our kids a new way to go and some real hope for the future.
—Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
A gunman opened fire on classrooms at a US university Monday, killing at least 30 people before turning his gun on himself in the bloodiest school shooting in US history.
…
The carnage surpasses the 15 who died in the April 20, 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado that shocked the nation and world.Monday’s shooting rampage is overshadowed only by a 1927 bombing at a Michigan school that killed 38 children and seven teachers.
—Carnage on US campus leaves 33 dead
A fitting post. People like to think of incidents such as this one as being somehow ‘incomprehensible’; and in a sense they are, but not nearly as completely as people would like to believe. Extreme cases such as this one, or rather, their frequency and exact nature can serve as a kind of thermometer: just as mercury in a thermometer will tell us about the temperature in a room, the ‘monsters’ will tell us about the level of pressure in a society. If outbursts of seemingly incomprehensible violence are becoming more common, that means that the pressure is increasing. And everyone is feeling this pressure, not just the few nutcases who commit massacres. To be sure, the vast majority of us do not react in such extreme ways; but we are all reacting in some ways. For me, that’s the interesting part. How are the ‘normal’ people reacting to the pressure that led a few (but an increasing few, or the increasingly violent few) on the margins to commit atrocities? In what ways are ‘normal’ people starting to bend and crack under the ever more intense pressure? And what is to be done about this?
Comment by Hasha — 19 April 2007 @ 11:02 PM