School Shootings – Why?

I’m no psychologist, but I don’t think you have to be to understand a little bit of what is going on when kids shoot up a school and kill a lot of people. Whether it’s Columbine or Virginia Tech, I believe the origins are the same:

A feeling of powerlessness and overwhelming lonliness and failure.

How many times have you heard your industry/company/office called "high school with pay?"  There’s a good chance the answer to that question is at least once. Let’s face it, high school, and increasingly college, is a society that is for the most part, identical to the larger world, only with smaller boundaries. Plus, school has an artificial timeline that marks the beginning of a year and its end. While in school, you get a number of opportunities to start over and begin again. In real life, those opportunities are few and hard won. But in school, they’re built in to the curriculum. But still, school is patterned after real life, or, as many say, real life is patterned after school. The only real difference, is that school can be much, much meaner.

Children (and I include college kids in that group) for the most part, haven’t yet learned to be compassionate, caring, empathetic people. They can often be barely civilized savages that ostracize and shun in ways that would make the characters from The Scarlet Letter gasp in horror. Whether the benchmarks that others are judged against are money, appearance, sense of style, race, background or popularity, if someone doesn’t measure up, life can become very, very difficult for them. I really believe that the kids today have a much more difficult time than the children of a generation ago. I believe the bullies are more evil, more capable of inflicting pain and more creative in their prosecution of the unacceptable. There’s more money available to them, and they are farther removed from the baser realities of life, like struggle, financial hardship and a need to ensure survival. In short, good, prosperous times create fat, indulgent uncaring bullies.

I grew up in a time that was good, but not as decadent fat as we live today. My parents grew up not long after the depression, not hardened by it, but most definitely aware of it, since their parents were smack dab in the middle of it. By the time today’s 20 year old was born, in 1987, our way of life was so far from the 1930s, it was ancient history. To them, the days of the depression were farther removed by 20 years than World War I was from me. Ancient history.

Today’s youth grew up in a time of more consumption than the world has ever known. They’ve grown up further removed from the production of food than at any time in the history of the world. I was in high school in a fairly affluent town of 5,000 where a significant number of my classmates worked de-tasseling corn for their summer job. I never did that, my father’s business employed me in a somewhat less onerous job, but still manual labor and bottom rung.

Today’s media constantly streams imagery at everyone creating incredible expectations about life, wealth and what is normal. How can a average American kid today feel good about himself? He or she is constantly barraged by what they see in the movies, on the internet and on TV, all of it superior to their own life and self. How can they NOT feel inferior and like a failure? Add twisted narcissists their own age, who have bought into the unreal messages the media slings at them, and then try to elevate themselves by stomping on the kids least like the ideal and you’ve got a pretty good number of messed up victims, who if they don’t find the help or peace they need, will strike out in one way or another. Occasionally, they do so in a violent way. Add a little mental illness say, or the abuse of drugs and/or alchohol and you’ve got a serious problem. A VERY serious problem.

We haven’t seen the end of these troubles, I fear.

Posted in US