While Bill bombs the bad boys in the Balkans and the stock market soars, the beast from
within blasted us below the belt right in our own back door this week. Of course, I speak
of the morbid mass murder of 15 students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
The barrage of bullets and bombs came from two post-modern "Billy the Kids" who
were students at the school.
Amidst the shock, sorrow and anger created by this horrible crime, the airwaves and
printing presses are flooded with 1001 attempts to explain why this happened and try to
cast the blame everywhere but where it belongs. The blame lies with the two young men who
pulled the triggers and nowhere else. They were old enough to understand right and wrong.
They chose to do evil.
The reality is that we live in a sinful world with lots of bad people, and a little of
the beast resides in each one of us. I am reminded of the cartoon representing our
conscience when it shows the good and bad angel arguing back and forth, trying to convince
the character to do right or wrong. We all give in sometimes, but most of us usually
resist the most dark and evil thoughts that we might have and follow the better angels of
our nature. Sadly, as long as this world exists, there will be people like this who bar
the door to listening to whatever good resides in them and let evil take control.
Passing the buck and playing the blame game is hard to resist. I imagine my opening
sentence made you think I was going to play the blame game, and I admit I was tempted. I
have many ideas and suspicions of why these young men chose to go down the wrong path. I
want to say things are worse than they ever have been -- that if their parents, the school
and society would have done things differently, it wouldn’t have happened. However, I
can’t. I don’t think we can ever really avoid all random or planned acts of
violence. In trying to do so, it could lead to unintended consequences that we don’t
want.
The choice we constantly face in this country is whether we preserve our freedom or
give in to our fears, real or imagined. One of the most quoted statements by an American
was offered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first Inaugural Address when he said,
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Speaking in the middle of the Great
Depression, Roosevelt was appealing for people not to give up in bad times, but to be
positive, roll up their sleeves and get to work to find solutions to their problems. Most
of the New Deal programs, in hindsight, were substantively a failure; but Roosevelt
sparked hope and inspired the people of the country to persevere through a difficult time.
I think Roosevelt tipped us too much in the direction of centralized government. Yet,
things could have turned out much worse, if extremists like Father Coughlin or Huey Long
would have come to power. Encouraging and giving people hope helped to keep the country
together because we didn’t give in to fear, and it preserved much of our freedom. It
would have been easy for the country to fall prey to the political extremities of Fascism
or Communism that became prevalent in many parts of the world and led to World War II and
the Cold War.
In recent years, when faced with a tragedy, politicians have jumped at the chance to
push some agenda that plays on our fear and sorrow. We are already hearing calls for new
laws to ban guns, increase school security and spend more money on whatever they can
connect with the Littleton shooting.
Now, I believe we need safety and security, but I love freedom more and am afraid
isolated events like this are being used to take much of our freedom away. This is a time
for sorrow and grief. It isn’t a time for knee jerk reactionary policies to be
implemented in the heat and passion of this tragic moment in time. We have many examples
in recent years of similar things being done that I think are giving in to our fears at
the expense of sacrificing part of our freedom.
In light of an airplane crash that the government officially determined to be an
accident, we passed sweeping regulations to beef up airplane security. The result is
boarding delays and extreme intrusion into our privacy every time we take a flight.
In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, we passed legislation that is so sweeping
that it is possible for any farmer to be arrested for being a terrorist just because he is
in possession of a large amount of fertilizer. I don’t think you have a lot to worry
about, as farmers, but the wide police powers given to the government make such actions
possible.
I had to go to the Federal building in Lincoln to do some business a few days ago on
April 19, which just happens to be the anniversary of Waco and the Oklahoma City Bombing.
I had to park several blocks away because parking isn’t allowed around the building.
If any of you have been to downtown Lincoln, you know that parking is hard to find anyway.
So, it can be quite a nuisance.
When you get inside the building, everyone is treated as a suspect. You have to go
through a metal detector, and there are numerous guards around. Once inside, the offices
that need to be accessible on a regular basis to the public (such as the social security
office and IRS) are hardly user-friendly. You have to go up to a tiny window to ask for
help. But, first you must take a number and wait your turn while only one or two people
are there to screen you. They try to take care of things without letting you in the
office. Therefore, you have to attempt explaining or showing your paperwork through this
tiny window that is smaller than a McDonald’s drive-up window.
If you have more detailed business, you are allowed into the inner sanctum; but you are
escorted to the desk of the person with whom you need to speak and out again like you are
a criminal suspect. Dealing with bureaucrats has always been frustrating, but dealing in
such a rigid, cold and suspicious atmosphere adds to the unpleasantness.
Despite all the security measures, it appears to me that it wouldn’t stop a
terrorist who really wanted to destroy the building. That would be especially true of a
fanatic who didn’t care if he lost his life in the process. I saw several flaws to
protecting the building, but I won’t mention them. I want to make sure I don’t
violate some anti-terrorist law. It mainly serves to further isolate government agencies
from the people and treat honest citizens as suspects.
In Washington D.C., they have been steadily taking added security provisions for the
government and making it even more removed from the citizenry. This weekend the NATO
meeting will cause some of the Museums of the Smithsonian Institute to be closed to the
public for the first time, out of fear of terrorism. While this is going on, all the
statistics tell us that violent crime is on the decline in the country. So, it seems that
while there are real concerns, we are overreacting because of fear.
As a parent, I fully understand our paternal instincts to want to protect children.
When we see a tragedy like this, we are ready to do anything that seems to heighten
safety. However, I don’t know that we want our children raised in an atmosphere where
going to school is like entering a prison. It is already approaching that in many urban
areas because the schools were starting to look like war zones, and many still do. I am
not trying to make light of what is a real problem. I just think it is better to attempt
to solve the problem once the intense emotions subside so people can think rationally.
A look back in history usually helps to regain one’s perspective. We can usually
find something in the past that is worse than whatever crisis we are living through today.
In the case of murdering school children, I was able to come across a worse crime that
happened in 1927. On May 18, 1927 in Bath, Michigan, a school board member by the name of
Andrew Kehoe bombed the Bath grade school. It killed 38 children and 7 adults. He, then,
blew up himself and the school board president in his car.
The murder in Littleton is horrible, but as we can see from history, these things have
happened before. The difference was that we didn’t turn all schools into heavily
guarded prisons. We didn’t take away guns from law-abiding citizens. We didn’t
spend millions of our federal tax dollars on new educational safety programs or
educational programs of any type.
I listened today on an Omaha radio station that illustrated how reacting while emotions
are high can make people do stupid things. Yesterday, one of the TV stations sent someone
into the public schools to walk through the halls and did so without checking in at the
office in order to see if they would be detected. In one school, students were in between
classes and the person went 13 minutes without being detected. When she was detected, the
police were called.
Today, on the radio, a school board member called the talk show expressing extreme
anger over what the TV station had done. He said he would do everything he could to see to
it that the news people were prosecuted for terrorism and sent to prison. This is clearly
an overreaction. The TV station did expose that security is lax, although it seems
irrelevant to the current problem when it is students who did the crimes in Littleton
instead of strangers.
The news station is not without blame either because the timing of this clearly is, at
least, partially an attempt to take advantage of people’s heightened fear in order to
boost ratings. Everyone involved has good intentions for helping to solve problems, but
the TV station shouldn’t have done what it did at this time. Yet, the school board
member is irrational to want to send them to jail.
We all hope that we never have to see another tragedy like what happened in Littleton,
but we must assure that the preventive measures don’t give in to fear to the point
that we lose our freedom. Raising our children in fortresses and teaching them to fear
everything and everyone will eventually create a situation where freedom will eventually
die anyway. As they say in New Hampshire, "Live Free or Die."
To Joe's
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