When I was a sophomore in high school, a buddy and I (we'll call him Toby) were sitting in third hour study hall bored out of our minds, so we decided to make an enemies list.
It really was that simple.
Our enumeration was penned on college-ruled notebook paper with a blue Bic, and included the names of our school principal, vice-principal, gym teacher, Algebra teacher and a short list of fellow classmates we felt, after much deliberation, either had wronged us, wronged someone we knew, or who by our best estimation were unlikely to contribute anything meaningful to society in the future.
We titled it: Those Amongst Us Who Must Die Without Mercy.
We must have been laughing about it, or whispering too loudly, making it obvious without meaning to that we weren't getting a lot of studying done. All of a sudden, the study hall teacher (we'll call her Mrs. Thomson), appeared above us, reached down and snatched the notebook off the table. I instinctively tried to hold onto it, and she had to struggle to wrest it free.
But wrest it free she did, and Toby and I glanced at each other with excitable laughter as her eyes tumbled down the length of the page.
Her response? With a loud disapproving huff, a roll of her eyes, she tore the list out of the notebook, tossed the notebook back on our table and sauntered off indignantly.
"This is NOT proper use of study hall time!" she barked. When she reached her desk she crumpled it up, tossed it in her waste basket, sat down and continued whatever it was she did to while away the hour.
That was the end of it. 'Those Amongst Us Who Must Die Without Mercy', and that was the end of it.
Toby and I were just pimply-faced teenagers who thought we were clever or 'edgy', or something or other. Though I have written fiction suggesting otherwise, I bore no serious ill-will toward anyone back then, not beyond the norm anyway. The teenage years are tough for a lot of kids, and while I was not prom king by any stretch of the imagination, I nevertheless basked quite confidently in the splendor (in my mind) of being Jared; and that had a way of getting me through just about any emotional torment teenagehood could throw at me. As for Toby, he was all set to join the Army after graduation. He was kind of a gun nut, come to think of it. But nothing about him lent any significance to that fact. There were teachers we each didn't like, students we didn't get along with, truly didn't think would contribute much to society in the future. We were young, and immature, and our 'enemies list', the humor we derived from it, was a kind of joking pageantry. I did a lot of things for shock value/humor when I was young.
That being said, I am just a little nervous writing these words, uneasy at the prospect of posting this, as if I'm revealing (confessing) some horrible plot.
There's not a goddamn thing funny about it anymore. Maybe there wasn't then either, but there sure as hell isn't now.
If Toby and I were caught with that list these days, we'd be immediately shepherded out of study hall, straight to the office, a host of security personnel and school 'liasions' alerted to the situation. The cops would be called, parents notified, nothing less than a pre-conceived and tightly orchestrated response put into action, the end result very likely involving our suspension, or outright expulsion, from school.
But in 1989, school shootings, as we know them today, were not a ready part of the American dialogue. They were completely unknown to the likes of Toby and me. And Mrs. Thomson, evidently.
Before I go any further, I must express my deepest sympathies and condolences to the families of the victims in Newtown, Connecticut. How awful, how unimaginably awful to have to go through that. It's heartbreaking and shocking enough when it's teenagers. But when it's first graders, truly innocent in the sense of that word that makes us cry, who come to school in 'cute kid stuff', as the Connecticut state medical examiner testily answered a reporter's rather sensational question last week as to what the victims he examined were wearing, it's beyond belief.
Looking back, I can't help wondering if Mrs. Thomson thought for even the briefest of moments that Toby and I posed a threat, that our list might be a very real plot. The gun debate was certainly in full swing then. American gun culture was being blamed for a string of violent incidents that can easily be reviewed on Wikipedia nowadays. And there were school shootings. Bob Geldof's song 'I Don't Like Mondays' is about a 1979 incident. Later, Pearl Jam's 'Jeremy' dealt with the subject. And truth be told, the list of violent incidents on or around educational institutions goes back several decades.
Mrs. Thomson knew Toby and me; she knew our parents; she could remain reasonably assured that we were decent kids all around, which doubtless determined her response. But these days she would not have the luxury of that assumption. If she discovered a list like that, she would absolutely have to take action.
Now is a good time to make clear also that I'm not a gun nut. While I support Second Amendment rights, I don't think they are, or should be, absolute. I don't think ordinary people need automatic weapons or special ammunition. In the words of the great Robin Williams: "How many deer wear a bullet proof vest?" Nor do I think most people need to arm themselves on the street, at least not to paramilitary specs. I can't say I'm comfortable stepping onto a city bus, or into the lobby of a McDonald's, or a bar, thinking that every person in my midst might be packing.
Moreover, it's no secret that our society's fixation with fire power as an extension, or the source, of our influence is out of control. For over one hundred years now we have propagated a gun culture by tying it securely to the hip of our mindset of being the biggest and the baddest and the loudest. We have turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, drawing an almost spirituality from a 'guns a-blazin' mentality that may have settled the west, may have won important wars, may make for good cinematic fodder, but cannot be correctly installed in our comfy, 21st century reality. It does not make our malls, movie theaters, coffee shops and cafeterias safe places to be.
And it's hard to ignore the fact that Adam Lanza's mother was reportedly a gun enthusiast herself, impossible to dismiss the sheer folly of her (reportedly) taking her troubled son to the shooting range, or for that matter having a troubled son whom she was (reportedly) prepared to have committed, yet failing to keep her arsenal safely under lock and key.
But the fact that a mere twenty-three years ago, Mrs. Thomson simply crumpled up Toby's and my enemies list - replete as it was with specific names of student and faculty, not to mention that horrific title scrawled across the top - and threw it away, whereas today high schools across the country operate in veritable lockdown - banning book bags and backpacks, certain articles of clothing, installing alarm systems, hiring security guards, 'buzzing' people in and out of the playground through locked doors - tells me it's more than just the guns that has brought us here, suggests that in a relatively short period of time the situation has gotten markedly worse.
I believe there is a profound mental health issue at play, not specifically Lanza, or James Holmes, or any other, but amongst an entire generation. Something is different about kids today, something is contributing to a change in their behavior not seen as readily - if at all - in previous generations, and along with the proliferation of guns, we must address the proliferation of the dead-eyed school shooter amongst the ranks of our young people, and acknowledge that he is unique to the last twenty years, directly related, at least in some measure, to the dramatic change in the manner with which our children are being raised.
We foster a permeating culture of dysfunction in our young people, without realizing it. We raise them on a toxic diet of fatalism mixed with self-indulgence. They are coddled, allowed to grow up in nothing less than a citadel of self-esteem, a practice which leaves them strangely unafraid of anything and at the same time terrified of everything, from germs to pollution to strangers on the street to off-color remarks. They are taught to be snarky and sarcastic as a means of coping, medicated when they act up, and told none of it is their fault. They are physically softer than any generation before, and also rendered mentally weak by the very technology that is supposed to be freeing them, enlightening them (er, so Apple, Verizon, Facebook and Google would have us believe...).
Ironically, the current state of affairs really isn't their fault; they are unwitting victims just as we (i.e., society) are unwitting perpetrators, and I know full well that every old generation says the same thing about every new. But saying that's 'just the way of things' does not change the fact that with the passing of every generation, things seem to get worse and worse.
The dead-eyed school shooter is not a criminal in the traditional sense. His acts do not arise from adversity or hardship, are not spurred by conflict or revolution in the face of injustice, they possess no 'passion' at all, no heat-of-the-moment decision. They are usually discovered to be carefully and exactingly plotted ahead of time, and arise from boredom, alienation and desensitization mixed with an inflated sense of self-importance, a hubris we now hand out as a birthright. It is fueled by a celebrity culture that DOES celebrate - and with relish - a concentrated absorption of violence, slickly packaged in bright celebrity foil. Violent movies and violent video games obviously have the greatest effect on young minds, all minds. They eliminate the very real danger of these weapons from our minds by eliminating their weaponness, while at the same time tweaking in myriad ways the aggression, and the innate desire to use that aggression to influence the world around, that lurks in all of us.
But I'd take it a step further. I think there is a more wide-spread, but not as obvious, poison contributing on a benefactor's scale to the situation we find ourselves in today, hastening the eradication of even our most elemental sense of well-being, peace of mind, and to that end I would reserve my harshest indictment for television, as it remains the single greatest delivery system for information (there's the Internet now, of course, but that just might be a whole other post...).
Television has become a fucking wasteland of baneful imagery and sloganism whose purpose seems to be engendering selfishness, self-absorption and cynicism in the viewer, lately without even bothering to be artful. 'Reality' shows like The Bad Girls Club, Hardcore Pawn, Jersey Shore, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Mob Wives, Basketball Wives, or the upcoming Buckwild (a redneck version of Jersey Shore...*sigh*...) et al., ad infinitum and ad nauseam, are not mere harmless tripe, in fact might be worse than a violent movie or video game, which at least remain, in the eyes of most people, fantasy. These shows purport to be real-life confessionals, and celebrate, literally, the worst of human nature - pettiness, aggression, not 'taking shit' from anyone, lazing in ignorance, gluttony, consumerism, and call it 'living out loud'. And our desire to preserve a free society - as in freedom of speech and freedom of choice - breathes life into each new incarnation, allows each new season to turn our boundaries into oatmeal. People drinking too much, screaming at each other, sweating, farting and fighting, punching each other in the face, pushing each other into fountains, pissing into bushes, puking on boardwalks, gesturing threateningly, swaggering pointlessly...all of this is no longer marginalized behavior. It is celebrity. It is endorsement deals. It is one million Twitter followers.
It is 'brought to you by Pepsi...'
Am I suggesting Adam Lanza watched The Bad Girls Club and was set on a collision course with history? Of course not. Not even close. There were obviously severe mental health issues unique to Lanza that almost certainly weren't curable and may not have been controllable. But nobody should delude themselves into thinking the caustic lifeblood of our society does not corrode its structure from the inside. In an age when corporations spend millions of dollars for thirty seconds of air-time during the Superbowl, nobody should dare be thinking that imagery, even fed in small, regurgitated bites and under the guise of 'entertainment', does not tweak the color, taste and odor of our impulses, and thus behavior. Nor should anyone fail to acknowledge that this is equally true of the well-adjusted and the not so well-adjusted amongst us.
Adam Lanza did not make the choice he made, plan what he did, merely because there were guns in the home. Guns - assault weapons especially - are a big part of the dialogue, but that dialogue will ultimately prove fruitless, and eventually fall silent, if any attempt to remove firearms from the hands of law-abiding citizens or curb their accessibility from same as a result of the Sandy Hook shooting does not dovetail with an earnest reassessment of what we consider worthy of our, and our children's, leisure time and attention.
