4/27/02 
I don't really want to minimize so tragic an event as the school shooting in Germany yesterday by politicizing it, but Reynolds posts an excerpt from an e-mail sent to him by Craig Schamp that makes a good and interesting point:

I saw your appropriate comment about the shooting in Germany, questioning the value of gun control. Another thing just struck me: Germany has very strict laws against showing violence in video games. I think there are some video games that I've played which have a switch to disable "virtual blood" in the game. I'm pretty sure that in Germany, you can't enable depictions of blood in a game.

After the Columbine shooting, and at other times, plenty of people in the U.S. have tried to show a causality between shoot-em-up games and violent youth. Seems like an even more specious claim now.

Where are the "root causes" folks when something like this occurs? They all tend to focus on side issues which have nothing at all to do with the "why" of it; instead, their efforts are directed toward advancing their own pet agendas (i.e., gun control, censoring or banning video games). This is understandable, I suppose - getting at the underlying motivation for as seemingly incomprehensible and certainly disturbing an occurrence as this is difficult and uncomfortable, to say the least. And to be honest, I don't find this or any of the other shootings all that incomprehensible anyway. Based on the information currently available on the Erfurt school shooting, the following may be kind of tangential and is most likely not relevant to that situation, but I'd like to make a more generally-applicable point here.

I started reading at a very early age and as a consequence I was given a seemingly endless battery of IQ tests and eventually skipped 4th and 5th grades. I was something of a curiosity in my neighborhood - I can remember the high school kids walking home from school (before I ever started school myself) and stopping in my yard when I was out playing, handing me various books or the New York Times and having me read them aloud, trying to trip me up by bringing something difficult that I'd stumble over or fail to understand, which never once happened. From then on, I always felt like the outsider looking in, like everyone else had been given some secret information that allowed them to make sense of the world, while I just remained confused by it all. Add to that the natural intimidation I felt from being in the company of the "big kids" all the time and what you end up with is a fairly resentful, brooding little shit. I spent my junior-high and part of my high school years playing the role of the outcast reject. You know the type - the guy in the back of the classroom glowering at everyone and offering surliness and sarcasm on the rare occasions when I deigned to speak at all. God help me, I even wore a trench coat in seventh and eighth grades. I was a fairly big kid and wasn't tormented by the jocks at school the way the Columbine shooters were, but I do admit to doing my share of fantasizing about "showing 'em all" one day. I don't think the kind of maladjustment we see in some of these child/killers today is anything new or unique at all, or is all that much different in either kind or degree from the kind of alienation I felt from very early on. The tendency to give too much weight to these sorts of growing pains and to characterize them as serious disorders in need of professional treatment is the new factor in the equation, I think. When I was a kid, it was generally understood that a teenager would on occasion feel lonely, depressed, and anti-social. The common response of my parents was basically "it's okay, you'll get over it." No Prozac or Ritalin, no hovering shrinks trying to figure out why I hated my father or some such tripe.

What it all boils down to is this: I think that overall, we allow - hell, encourage - a very disproportionate and inappropriate level of importance to be attached to what teenagers think and feel. Contrary to the accepted wisdom out there, I have thought for a long time now that kids today probably should get a lot less attention, not more. Of course, this doesn't apply to poor pathetic ghetto kids whose parents barely even acknowledge their existence at all. But these school mass-murders aren't being done by those kids anyway. It's the kids who come from comfortable homes, whose parents are at least somewhat high achievers, and who have at least some potential for success in life themselves who are doing the killing out there, or at least the non-gang-related media-spectacular killing anyway. I don't buy the argument that it's all because Mom and Dad are too career-obssessed and don't make enough time to throw the old baseball around in the backyard with little Johnny, or to "just talk." Nor do I think it has anything to do with Johnny's lowered expectations for his own life brought on by (insert one): a) the threat of nuclear war (an oldie but goodie); b) the perpetually-struggling economy; c) the destruction of our natural environment; d) general cultural malaise and lack of purpose or direction. I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that so much of our culture is geared towards making Johnny feel as though he's the "hope for the future," that as soon as he or she graduates high school the world will be depending on his wisdom and vision to correct all the wrongs that all of us muddle-headed or greedy adults have been so unable or unwilling to rectify; that we're all just waiting for little Johnny to walk across that stage, grab that diploma, and get busy showing us what we've been doing wrong all these years. That's a lot of pressure to be putting on kids who basically just want to get drunk, hang out, and cruise chicks. The idea, promulgated by the "Rock the Vote" folks and plenty of others, that the youth of today is just bursting with bold new ideas that We All Should Be Heeding is just a load of over-indulgent crap. After all, take a look at some of the wonderful things that have resulted from excessive pandering to the youth market: Zima. Marilyn Manson. Bill Clinton. Stupid little Japanese pickup trucks slammed to the ground with neon around the bottom of them and dopey-looking Matchbox-car wheels. Greenpeace. Limp Bizkit. Rap music in every commercial you ever hear. Dennis Rodman. Pants that don't fit. Sneakers that look like something Neil Armstong might've worn to walk on the moon. My advice to the youth of today: lighten up. Enjoy what you can and deal with what you can't. Life is short, but it's also quite long too. And nothing is ever as important as your high-school guidance counselor says it is - not even you.