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injest:
Leonard Pitts: 10 years after Columbine, reflecting on evil
06:48 PM CDT on Friday, April 17, 2009
Ten years ago today, two boys, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, walked into Columbine High in Littleton, Colo. and unleashed hell, killing 13 people, wounding 23 and then committing suicide. In the process, they also unleashed a firestorm of speculation from media-appointed experts, jostling to answer what was suddenly the most important question in the world:
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"Why? Lord, why?" They told us video games did it. They said years of bullying did it. They said being ostracized did it. They said violent movies did it. They said bad parenting did it.
I said evil did it.
That observation was not especially popular. Small wonder. What do you say after you say evil did it? The very idea stops the discussion, forecloses the hopeful notion that there is something we can do, some measure we can take, to keep this obscenity from happening again. If you say bullying did it, you can seek ways to curtail bullying. If you say video games did it, you can pass laws to curtail video games.
But how can you curtail evil? What law can do that?
And yet, here we are, 10 years out, and I find myself reading reports on the new scholarship that has sprung up around the Littleton massacre, including a book called Columbine by Dave Cullen. And the consensus seems to be that everything we thought we knew about why those boys did what they did is wrong.
Turns out they were not bullied. Nor were they outcasts. Nor were they unduly influenced by violent movies. Nor were their parents bad.
Turns out they were simply two profoundly damaged boys.
Which brings us back to evil. It is, I grant you, a fraught and loaded word. It flies in the face of our innate belief in the perfectibility of human beings, suggesting as it does something that is beyond redemption, beyond correction, beyond our power to fix. Better to think in terms of psychological illness because illness, at least, implies an ability to be cured.
I am not saying psychological maladies do not exist or that they cannot help us understand why we do the things we do. What I am saying is that there are some behaviors so monstrous they dwarf our attempts to comprehend them with psychological verities.
Did Adolf Hitler murder 6 million Jews because he had a strained relationship with his father? Would it matter if he did? Yes, Harris and Klebold killed nowhere near as many people as the Fuhrer, but it was not for lack of ambition. While we are conditioned to think of evil as something that comes wearing a Snidely Whiplash moustache or speaking in a Darth Vader voice, it is more often a banal thing hiding in plain sight just like this, hiding in the incremental moral compromises, failed humanity and grandiose self image of ordinary men. Until their fury breaks upon us abruptly as a clap of thunder in a summer storm.
Thus it was with Harris and Klebold. Thus it was with Seung-Hiu Cho after them and Charles Starkweather before. Thus it has been. And will be. Being human requires living with the knowledge that sometimes human beings shatter. And yet, still "living." So I will not begrudge you if you seek the rhyme or reason in what those boys did, but as for me, I will give them not an hour of my one and only life trying to comprehend their incomprehensible deed.
They've taken more than enough already.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-pitts_20edi.State.Edition1.2ca48ec.html
Clyde-B:
It was writing off people and events as evil that allowed the ugliness of the world to go unchecked for centuries.
It was only when we started asking the question, "Why?" that we actually discovered that maybe evil is a myth, maybe there is only hurt and pain, and maybe something can be done about that. Perhaps if we keep looking and are clever enough, we may discover no one need ever hurt so badly that they must make the rest of us suffer too.
Brown Eyes:
Dave Cullen was on the Rachel Maddow show last night. I was on the phone with the TV on mute. When my TV is on mute it automatically goes to closed captioning, but still I missed most of the content.
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: Clyde-B on April 21, 2009, 09:43:57 am ---It was writing off people and events as evil that allowed the ugliness of the world to go unchecked for centuries.
It was only when we started asking the question, "Why?" that we actually discovered that maybe evil is a myth, maybe there is only hurt and pain, and maybe something can be done about that. Perhaps if we keep looking and are clever enough, we may discover no one need ever hurt so badly that they must make the rest of us suffer too.
--- End quote ---
What you say is profound, friend. I agree with you. However, I believe the time to quell hurt and pain should come early in life, lest it be in vain.
Front-Ranger:
I was on my way to work. It seems like not such a long time ago. If you travel that freeway even today, there are wide stretches of open ground. Unincorporated Jefferson County, they call it. An intensely car-based area where, to get to a Borders bookstore which you can see right in front of you at the corner, you have to make a right turn, go a half mile, make a U turn onto a frontage road, go back a half mile, make a right turn, go a half-mile, turn into a parking lot, go right 500 yards, and then go up and down looking for a parking spot.
The largest buildings are big barnlike Evangelical churches. Two other mega buildings have appeared recently: a Home Depot that stands on a bluff like a fort, and a liquor store that holds classes in winetasting and big networking events on Fridays.
I had no sooner arrived at work when I was called up to my supervisor's office. I was ushered into a conference room with two other coworkers. There was obviously going to be some heavy shit happen and I felt my lungs constrict. The subject at hand was the previous Friday, when a proposal was being prepared to ship out on deadline, there was a heavy spring snowstorm, and I was at home on leave. Since my staff was having trouble with the proposal, I talked with them by phone several times during the day and they faxed me parts of it to work on. Twice I had offered to put chains on my tires and make the trip into the office but my staff had said they had everything under control.
However, my supervisor and coworkers weren't aware of this and assumed I was off skiing or lying on a bear rug eating bon bons and watching soap operas on TV. After I straightened them out, a colleague, meaning to try to make me feel better, said, "All this happened because you were away from your desk. We just can't do without you, Lee." Then, my supervisor made a pronouncement that from now on, whenever there was a deadline, that I was to be at work, no matter what my schedule might be. I emerged from that meeting to learn that during it, there was a crisis at a school only a few miles away from my children's school, and that 13 children were dead.
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