Evil or Just Abnormal?

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 4.25.07]

The shock and horror of the latest shootings on a campus can cloud clear thinking. But since the massacre I’ve been thinking about the whys. One way to shut off your thought processes: use utterly meaningless terms like “evil” to describe the shooter’s motivations.

If you think Columbine and the other school shootings (as well as all the office shootings) occurred because the ones perpetrating these acts were “evil,” you don’t need to delve deeper into why they have been happening.

This morning comes an article about the why’s. From Mark Ames, author of “Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplace to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond”, the article talks first about a study commissioned by the Secret Service to find anything in common among all the schoolyard and office killers.

The Secret Service report … was an exhaustive — and failed — attempt to profile school rage murderers. Some schoolyard shooters were honors students, some were bad students; some were geeks, some were fairly popular; and some were anti-social, others seemed to be easy-going and “not at all the type.” Some have been girls, a fact strangely overlooked by most. Like their rage counterparts in the adultworld, school shooters could be literally any kid except perhaps those who belonged to the popular crowd, the school’s version of the executive/shareholding class. That is to say, about 90 percent of each suburban school’s student body is a possible suspect.

Don’t profile people; profile the environment! Here are the warning signs, common in all shootings:

• complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;
• antiseptic corridors and overhead fluorescent lights reminiscent of mid-sized city airport;
• rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and
• maximally stressed parents push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.

Ames goes on with a description of American life for many:

Schoolyard shootings are too shocking and subversive to forget. They remind us that we were just as miserable as kids as we are as adult workers.

In fact, the similarities between the two, the continuity of misery and entrapment from school to office, become depressingly clear when you study the two settings in the context of these murders. Even physically, they look alike and warp the mind in similar ways: the overhead fluorescent lights, the economies-of-scale industrial carpeting and linoleum floors, the stench of cleaning chemicals in the restrooms, the same stalls with the same latches and the same metal toilet paper holders …

Then, after work or school, you go home to your suburb, where no one talks to each other and no one looks at each other, and where everyone, even the whitest-bread cul-de-sac neighbor is a suspected pedophile, making child leashes a requirement and high-tech security systems a given.

Instead of a real debate about fundamental, structural changes in the school and workplace environment, the kneejerk reaction is let’s have more and more laws, penalties, prisons to lock away all those “evil” and “crazy” people.

Those people are us. Ames details the number of web sites idolizing the Columbine shooters, detailing the currently still mostly uncensored nature of the Internet that allows these issues to bubble up, to be out there. If these events strike a chord of recognition in some people, it doesn’t mean an evil scourge has arisen. Look deeper than that.

The article, Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?, can be found here. Ames book (mentioned above) was excerpted in the current issue of Playboy.

Note: When I was last in the UK, I spotted a few posters on the street kiosks (in Birmingham) against Bullying. And recently, on a BBC podcast, I heard more on this. The British have been taking measures for at least the past 5 years to deal with school yard bullying. There are some things going on here. Check out No Bully.

School bullying is widespread across the United States. Each day an estimated 160,000 children refuse to go to school because they dread the physical and verbal aggression of their peers, and the loneliness that comes from being excluded and made the target of rumors and cyber-bullying. Many more students attend school in a chronic state of anxiety.