March 6, 2001
nother
senseless shooting in a local high school. I was near this place
on Sunday, while looking for home. I've been thinking long and
hard about what to post about this, and I was prepared for several
things. First, I am expecting that sooner or later, it will come
out that this young man played games. D & D, Quake, Risk,
Barbie's Great Adventure, who knows. I'm sure that people will
start blaming the gaming community for creating him. Then they'll
turn to the media, TV, movies, comics, books, whatever. So permeated
with violent acts. Sooner or later, we'll get around to blaming
the parents, who a coworker told me yesterday both work. Why
couldn't they instill some sense of decency in this child? Some
sort of responsibility. I was quite prepared to jump on this
bandwagon, in fact. I truly feel that parenting has significantly
greater impact on a child's development than any other possible
influence. So, I was prepared to rail away at his parents, convinced
in my heart that if only they'd done "this" or "that",
it would have made all the difference.
Then, I considered why both parents work. In fact, in our society, a large number of families have both spouses working. Why is that? It strikes me that we have created a society that requires an insane amount of income to maintain what we know of as a family. If you want a home, and children, it is almost required to have two incomes. And with corporate competition, and the work environment, it really isn't unusual for someone to have to put in 50 or 60 hours a week in order to keep their jobs.
So I'm not going to excuse the parents, the media, or the gaming industry.... but I am going to suggest that society is to blame. Sure, it's a grandiose statement, but if you look at all the elements, it makes sense, and is hard to argue against. Now, rather than later, we need to figure out how to change our societal structures to change this need...and provide our children the nurturing they need to get through adolescents in a sane manner. The only "fly" in the ointment of this argument is that there are hundreds of thousands (I'm conjecturing) of children who have both parents working, and never do something like this. It really is too bad that we don't come with instruction manuals on how to raise us.
Rather than grieving for a race car driver who died doing a job in which the risk is always there, I'll grieve instead for these two children who's lives have been taken from them just by attending a school.