Right after the Columbine shootings, I remember a friend me that he heard some news reports where some of the shooters' classmates admitted that a lot of the other students treated them pretty badly. This quickly became non-PC to say on the grounds that it was blaming the victim (which shouldn't itself be a reason for not saying things...not as a blanket philosophy anyway). Likewise, I remember that right after the Sept. 11th attacks, I was listening to the radio and a guy started talking about how Osama Bin Laden had been trained in terrorist tactics by the George Bush led CIA. This too quickly faded into the realm of things that you should know better than to say.
These are the kind of acts that I find the most irritating because they are indicative of self-evaluation on a social level. Too often America and the media support a system of morality through political correctness that loses perspective between cause and effect and good versus evil. The social environment discourages people to refine the ideological order, which severely limits its ability to grow and get better.
America likes to think of itself as the victim for some reason. This belief was never more apparent or more absurd than in the way the battles are presented in the film "Black Hawk Down." That movie presents technologically advanced American soldiers slaughtering guys with rocks and sticks. It is almost like watching an alien invasion against a primitive species. The fact that the US is Goliath just simply can't be hidden. Yet, the film presents the American side as if it were David, and as I watched the film I got this mental image of the entire American psyche sitting there like a big, fat, spoiled baby, pacified by the image they expected and felt they deserved to see.
I believe there must be a different code of conduct for people who are in power (be it in the world, in the media or in a school environment) than for those who are weaker. The people in power should be held to a higher standard. An analogy that would make this clear is the difference between how a physically large man and a physically small man (or a woman) can act in public. A physically small man is allowed to "speak" in certain body language that would be considered aggressive and inappropriate for a large man. This is because the small man is not really considered a threat by anybody. By virtue of the large man's mere physical presence, he is required to conduct himself more carefully.
If somebody leads an unprovoked attack against the small man, this is clearly an act of unjustified aggression. However, an unprovoked attack against a giant is something else. The giant may have been sending some message, even a message that he was not conscious of, out into the public that needed to be retaliated against. If the giant does not have the self-awareness to see the effect he is having on his small community, or is too apathetic or proud to develop it, then he does deserve to endure the consequences of his actions. He deserves this because he IS a factor in the situation whether he tries to be or not. The same argument could be made about a beautiful woman versus an ugly one. They drive the situation around them just with their presence and wield extreme power.
I think a fair definition of evil would be any act that is in conflict with the best interests of humanity. It doesn't matter if the person who commits the act is aware of its evil nature or not. When evil is done it is done, and it cannot be changed. Just because the person wasn't aware that his actions were evil doesn't excuse them. It doesn't make anybody less dead.
In the case of the Sept. 11th attacks, there is a clear case of cause and effect that worked in conflict with the interests of humanity. We trained people to be terrorists. The terrorists attacked us. Closed circuit. Such a thing can be prevented in the future, but not by needlessly attacking other countries. The answer to the problem is to become aware of our error and not do it in the future. It's not sexy, it's not really satisfying, it won’t get anybody re-elected, but it will provide results in terms of the evolution of the human race. Indulging in our rage and becoming intolerant and aggressive is an act contrary to the interests of humanity and it will have negative consequences far worse than anything we endured on Sept. 11th.
Likewise, blaming two stupid, confused kids for the shooting at Columbine is like blaming the small guy for the fight. It seems too easy, and it overlooks what seems to be an indication of real social problems. If they were just two isolated crazies, why does it keep happening? Blaming guns is equally stupid because guns are just a tool for killing and you can kill just as easily with a car as with a gun, maybe even easier. The problem is WHY these kids decided to kill. Why did they think the social order was so unfair that it needed to be utterly and mercillesly destroyed? Why didn’t they have any faith in the chain of command or social programs that are set up to help people like them? Why didn’t anybody anticipate the problem? Why didn’t anyone stop the other children from not treating them well (children are capable of extreme torture, this should not be dismissed)? It takes a hell of a lot for a kid to completely reject everything he/she knows and commit themselves to oblivion.
The only thing we know about the Columbine shooting was that two kids came to the conclusion that the system they lived in was irrevocably corrupted and it needed to be destroyed. Need it be said that their judgment was against the same system that allows priests to rape children without consequence, that subverts democratically elected leaders in economically deprived countries, that pays viscious killers like Monticino in Peru to support his reign of terror and which attacks the entire world for a terrorist assault that they themselves were really responsible for?
Do we know for sure that those two kids were not abused? Violence and self-loathing are common symptoms of this kind of attack. Is there any evidence that a priest might have gotten to them, or was this line of thinking dismissed as “politically incorrect” before it ever was allowed to gather momentum.
Or maybe it wasn’t even something so sinister. Maybe it all came about simply because the shooters parents were too busy with the careers TV tells them they should have to take the time to help out their own kids with depression. Maybe they hadn’t talked to their parents in months. Maybe they only knew their parents were in the house because they heard the car door slam with they were already in bed. Kids are basically abandoned in the United States, it’s a horrible problem.
Yes, their act of murder was horrific and wrong, but to just dismiss it is equally callous as not bothering to try to understand the lessons of the holocaust. To just say they were "crazy" is an irresponsible and lazy knee jerk reaction that is similar to a cover-up. Some force pushed these kids to murder and suicide, we have a responsibility to humanity to determine what that force was. I have a suspicion that if it isn't the same force that led us to train Osama Bin Laden, then it is at least a close relation. All of these things are connected and float just beneath the global village of social consciousness. All of them are under the protection of political correctness to not be intellectually explored, we are all conditioned not to think this way.
Why? Getting to the bottom of something never hurt anyone....or maybe I should say it never hurt anyone innocent. It sure as shit has hurt the wealthy and privaledged who have grown accustomed to finding new and clever ways to distract the masses from their culpability.
So I say that it is our responsibility to tear down this enticing offer of acceptance that comes from following the pressure and thinly veiled threat of political correctness. There are a lot of politicians and media members who are quick to call people “unpatriotic” and “traitorous” and all kinds of other loaded words whenever questions are asked that fall too close to the mark. What are they trying to hide, maybe there is a cover-up here that is bigger than anything anyone could comprehend. It’s time to have everything out in the open, they’re taking advantage of our good nature and we have to stop letting them. It may not be comfortable, and we may end up having to give up a lot of the luxuries we now enjoy, but at least we’ll be able to say we have honor and we aren’t contributing to the plague of evil that has ever burdened the human race.
The hardest act of any is to self-evaluate and see how it was through your error that a tragedy was allowed to come about. It’s humiliating and painful to the point that most people would avoid it at all costs. But self-evaluation has the advantage in the fact that seeing your mistake allows you to change your behavior. It is only over yourself that you have complete control, and it is much better to come to the knowledge of your errors on your own than it is to have some outside force achieve the same conclusion and oblige you to change.
Nobody’s strong enough to hold off every encroaching force forever. In the end it’s a lot easier to just do the right thing, even if that means giving up the luxury you inherited from your daddy’s oil company, and sharing your wealth with the impoverished nations of the Earth.
The End