The latest explosion at Santana High School in San Diego County is in an area I’m told that’s much like Thousand Oaks in Ventura County. It’s a decent school in a decent neighborhood, populated by kids who don’t look much different than the rest of our kids. However, something is obviously different, but what?
As I read the press reports about this kid who did the shooting, he sounds a little strange. But the truth is, he didn’t sound any stranger than half the teenagers I see around Malibu and some I’ve seen in my own family. Many of them have a perpetual black mood, a large hunk of attitude, morbid preoccupations, and appear to get enormous joy out of their depressions. They listen to music that is a total mystery to anyone over age 30 and revel in movies that include, at minimum, large amounts of dismemberment. It’s easy to think, “Well, no wonder there all these murderous little SOBs, it’s the music, it’s the video games, it’s the movies, it’s the Internet and we’ve got to put a stop to all this.”
With that comfortable thought in mind, I began to think back to when I was a teenager and how the adult population of the day reacted to our teenage culture back then. We had the beginnings of Rock and Roll, Moon Dog, and Earth Angel, and our clothing, which went from gangster to Beat, and they [the adults] were all certain we were consorting with the devil. My father, who leaned more toward Bach and Beethoven, had a permanent look of incomprehensibility on his face.
In high school we kids fought with each other. Generally, we just used our hands, but not always. We picked on each other. We got bullied when we were smaller and paid it back when we got bigger. We also played a lot of sports. Physical activity was a part of our lives, so, perhaps, some of that hostility got used up banging on someone else in a playground.
Our world, like today’s world, was a kid’s world. As long as you stayed out of trouble, adults had very little to do with you. The appearance of a parent at the park usually meant somebody died or you were in big trouble. It was a kid’s world, primarily male, age graded, and you rose to leadership just by the fact that, in time, you got older.
We had guys who were strange and guys who were angry, and some who I’m sure ended up in prison, but no one ever thought of killing anyone else. Even some of the kids who were kind of outcasts actually belonged because they had a role as the outcast.
The truth is, I don’t think we were that different than today’s kids; we drank, we smoked, a few of the more adventurous used marijuana, but we all knew it would drive the adults insane.
Still, we never got so angry, so isolated, so enraged that we wanted to kill anyone, or, for that matter, everyone. It wasn’t just us. I remember the first time there was a pointless mass murder by some nut case, I think in New Jersey, and we were all shocked.
So what’s different? What drives them to being murderous?
After thinking it over and searching deep into my soul, I can only say that I haven’t got the faintest idea where this deep unfocused anger comes from.
But something has to change. That code of silence that we all had as kids has got to end in the face of this murderous threat. We never told any adult the truth, but then we were never planning on mass murder.
I certainly don’t know the answer, but I’m fairly certain about what we have to do. When a kid says, “I’m going to take a gun to school and kill everyone,” we’ve got to believe him and act.
We’ve got to treat it exactly as the airlines do when someone jokingly says, “There’s a bomb in my luggage.” They act.
In our world the word is generally the predecessor to the deed, and though it is deeply ingrained in our culture that you never squeal, we have to work to change that attitude because now sometimes life and death are involved.
We have to do a major number to change kids’ attitudes about what they see as squealing. It’s not squealing — it’s getting help for someone who desperately needs it and is calling out for it. We’ve got to be our brother’s keeper, even if sometimes it’s not cool.