Cleveland Shootings and the Real Victims

So, there has been another school shooting.  I knew the wording of the details even before I read the article:  a loner, bullied by his peers, a disaffected youth adrift in the rough hierarchy of school social politics. 

            There is a critical difference between schools now and the schools I attended in the ‘60’s.  I grew up poor in a blue collar part of Denver, walking distance from what is now the Bronco’s Football Stadium.  My high school, North High, was known as a, “tough” school.  But the worst trouble a boy could get in would end up with him being bloodied pretty good--but not dead.   The toughest kid at North would never have dreamed of bringing a gun to school.

Explanation for the difference between juvenile delinquency and juvenile homicide lies in an examination of the difference between being financially poor and being spiritually poor.  It is certainly true that poor families of the past are not the same as poor families of today.  We have created a new kind of, “poor” in this country. 

The poverty I grew up with in Denver was caused by marginal employment, lack of education, racial injustice, or institutionalized classism. Those same causes of poverty exist today, but they have been reduced, and there is legal redress, as well as ethical intolerance for them.  True, there were people who were without talent, or drive, or luck, but no more or less than there are today.  The poverty of today is frequently the self-inflicted kind that comes from specific choices: drugs, early pregnancy, dropping out of school, treating welfare as a lifestyle instead of temporary assistance. 

Thirty years ago poverty had not been, “feminized.”   The poor where two parent families with a non-working, or marginally employed male.  The man in that family may not have had the job or the income that he wanted, but he was still the man in that family.  He was committed to the family.  Their well being and success were definitely on his radarscope.  Certainly, on an individual or anecdotal basis there were dysfunctional families, just as there are successful, though, non-traditional families. But, looking at society as a whole, the poor looked significantly different 30 years ago than they do now.  Likewise, in the past, victims of crimes were the people wronged, not the perpetrators. 

This is the spiritual poverty I was talking about.  There has been a, “victimization” of perpetrators.  There is a tendency to consider, “good” and, “bad” to be too judgmental, and therefore irrelevant.  This is incorrect.  There is no excuse for anyone shooting someone no matter how angry they are.  Violence is NEVER an acceptable solution to a problem.  Knowing why someone behaves in an antisocial way does have value, but as a preventative, not a defense. 

These student murderers are often pathologically anti-social.  But they have also learned a criminally casual attitude toward human life.  They learned in from a society that allows easy and irresponsible gun ownership.  They learned it from video games and movies that choose to sell violence because they know they will have ready buyers, hooked on the cheap drug called adrenaline.  They learned it from lawyers who are more worried about the rights of the accused than the pain of the victim.  They learned it from parents who are too self-centered to spend the time, effort and energy it takes to raise a child.  They learned the behavior from someone, and the rest of us are paying for it.

Let’s raise our children, and keep the faith.