27 April 1999
Like all others, our hearts go out to the families of the students and teacher who were killed in the bloody shooting spree at Columbine Highschool in Denver, Colorado. Families have been shattered, young lives taken as two teenagers, part of a gang, opened fire with rifles in the school. The two teenagers staging the massacre also took their own lives.It's an incredible tragedy. Community residents, politicians and media are scrambling for answers. Why did this happen?
Politicians have again reopened debate on the issue gun control. If only guns were made illegal or less easy to get, some say, then the tragedy may have been avoided. The NRA gun lobby says it has nothing to do with gun ownership.
Some point to the fact that the two perpetrators of the shooting were members of a gang, flirting with neo-Naziism, celebrating Adolph Hitler's birthday. They were just troubled young men with serious psychological problems.
Others point to the families - should the parents have taken more responsibility in controlling their own kids? Many point to the police proposing they be given more power to enter schools, search and detain troublemakers.
None of the debate calls into question the very destructive society that we live in, the root causes. One cannot make sense out of the Columbine tragedy without reflecting upon this.
Youth, as everyone else, are affected by the society they live in - the ruling ideas, the competitiveness, the bending to the profit motive as the ultimate shrine which judges what is good and bad.
It has resulted in a culture of death. One can see it in the gang warfare, "youth culture" and music which speak of ultimate hopelessness in an increasingly irrational, anti-human world. It's seen in the fashions and ads which celebrate "beauty" looking as if one is an anemic hooked on cocaine - all these things heavily promoted by industry geared to profit.
Under capitalism, everything is commodified, given a price - every form of intercourse and intercourse itself (as old Marx said in "The German Ideology"). All attempts at being human must bend to it. Capital, the system of wage labour, acts in an anti-social, anti-human way for it cares nothing about our humanness and deprives us of it.
Young children on the streets of major cities with impoverished ghettoes own and use guns trying to find some economic fortune in drug dealing as a way of life - the capitalist competitiveness of drug dealers. Teenagers become willing to beat and kill each other for the sake of the latest fashion trend, the newest style of Nike shoes (produced by child labour), because they are told that to be "cool" - to be "human" - means that one must have them.
Students are made to look forward to the "future" - to become wage slaves in a system that makes work a drudgery - where life is dog eat dog and the devil take the hindmost. If you cannot maintain employment, the problem is not the system, the problem is you. It is a system that tears apart the world in war, racism, environmental destruction which poses the possibility of destruction of humankind.
Families are torn apart as parents are forced to "earn a living" keeping the wolf of possible unemployment at bay. "Road rage" becomes a common occurrence. Employees and disgruntled workers enter post offices or stores raging with guns blazing and senseless violence becomes an everyday way of life.
Can one think that the alienation, the endless competitive grasping for money or some form of security, the mindless advertising that promotes a lifestyle unattainable to most, does not affect youth and how they think and act? Is it impossible to consider that this then reveals itself in violence?
More police control will not stop these tragedies from occurring. Gun control will not stop violence. The right to own guns will not be a deterrent. More emphasis on child rearing, parental influence, teacher control will not eliminate the violence. Trying to weed out "potential troublemakers" is an exercise in futility. Psychological testing to find "violent prone" individuals is anti-scientific nonsense.
Violence is produced by a system based on violence. That system is
capitalism. More than ever that system needs to be replaced by one which
recognizes our humanness - which allows for creativity, co-operation, the
meeting of our needs as human beings.