| Blame game won't buy peace of mind
Adam
J. Ferington
Commentary Editor
“So,” my friend says as the drink
careens down the slick bar toward me, “you
know what tomorrow is, right?”
I blink as my synapses misfire. I really have
to think about this. “Hitler’s birthday?”
I ask. “No wait; it’s a national pot
smokers holiday, right?” She scowls as she
roughly towels the drops of moisture off of the
wood. “No, dumb-ass. It’s the five-year
anniversary of the Columbine shootings.”
I take a sip of my drink and grimace. “Five-year
anniversary is what, wood?” I tap my knuckles
across the bar. She shakes her head. “I
believe the modern gift is silverware.”
I take another deep swig. “Silverware? What
are they going to do, leave piles of forks and
spoons at the victims’ graves? Hey, is this
even real absinthe?”
“Give me that,” she snarls, and snatches
the drink away from me. “No more of that
crap for you. You can stick to Pabst for being
an asshole.”
The old guy at the end of the bar with the smile
like black licorice looks up and cackles before
he resumes picking things out of his beard.
“Have a sense of humor,” I said. “It
doesn’t change a damn thing. What’s
done is done, and we’ve at least learned
from it.” She closes the till and squares
herself in front of me, giving me the hairy eyeball.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.
People still die every year in this country from
gun-related violence. If guns were illegal, none
of this would’ve happened. Those kids would
still be alive, along with a lot of other people.”
I shake my head and pull off of my cigarette.
“There you go again, trying to find an easy
solution to a difficult answer. There’s
a number of factors that contributed to the shootings;
not least of all was the shooters’ emotionally
fragile state of mind that was pushed to the threshold
by the constant bullying and harassment they endured.
They chose guns because they were cowards. If
they’d had any balls, they could’ve
just as easily gone ninja on everyone; hacked
them up with swords and then ritually disemboweled
themselves.”
She stared at me, flame tattoo on her upper forearm
flexing as she tried to compose herself. Suddenly
the licorice man in the corner pipes up, his ragged
southern drawl carrying over Johnny Cash on the
jukebox. “Ain’t nothing wrong with
guns. Guns didn’t kill no one, you didn’t
want them to. That’s why you got them. Once
was, you could go and settle disputes you needed
to, right in the street. Man’s got a right
to his guns, same as anything else. It’s
in the Con-sti-tu-tion. People like you are part
of the problem.”
My friend narrowed her eyes. “I don’t
remember asking you, and I don’t give a
damn what you think. So drink and shut up or get
the hell out.”
The licorice man cackles again. “See, proves
my point. You had a gun, you’d point it
at me, run me out of here. But you don’t,
so I’m gonna stay. No problem here, sweetie.”
He cackled again and went back to his drink. My
friend looked at me sideways and whispered. “You
don’t have a sword with you, do you?”
Not even a healthy dose of absinthe, Johnny Cash
or the mad ramblings of a toothless old man can
make sense of this. This is a wound we’ve
clawed at for the past five years like a bad case
of herpes, and the scars have become permanent.
History is hard to remember, despite all of the
noise, and there’s no easy answer to what
happened, never will be.
But that hasn’t stopped every special interest
group from polarizing the issue by throwing their
hands to the heavens and piggybacking the butchery
like apes in mating season to represent their
own personal crusade; anti-gun advocates (like
my friend) weigh heavily on the fact that Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris obtained their weapons
from the unregulated roaming gun bazaars; conservative
critics of culture say the shootings are the result
of what happens when ‘God is denied access’
by removing the Ten Commandments from schools
and public institutions; child psychologists cry
foul over “the prevalence of violent video
games and movies in our culture”; and parents’
organizations swiftly condemn the inaction and
omission of school districts to “protect
their children.”
There’s more than enough shame and bitterness
to go around and most of it is bullshit.
There’s no binary solution to prevent something
like this from happening again, and there never
will be. Placing stone tablets in school foyers,
heavily regulating firearms, banning anything
with a hint of violence and saturating schools
with video cameras cannot prevent the aspirations
of broken children, red in tooth and nail.
It would be utterly offensive and in exceptionally
poor taste to assume that the majority of people
in this country are greedy, ignorant, self-important
bastards who view their children as tiny versions
of themselves put here to rectify the monstrous
series of failures that their lives entail. But
I care little for the cheap accusations and cowardly
ignorance that an affirmation would undoubtedly
provoke and will instead simply expound on the
words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s master
detective: “Watson, you as a medical man
are continually gaining light as to the tendencies
of a child by the study of the parents. Don’t
you see that the converse is equally valid? I
have frequently gained my first real insight into
the character of parents by studying their children.”
Indeed. Children are foul, nasty little creatures,
but they know when they’re having one put
over on them. All of the bullying and harassment
that was ignored by the Columbine school officials,
the disregard and incompetence on the part of
the police toward Klebold’s and Harris’s
antics that slowly grew more malevolent, the denial
from both sets of parents—they all drove
the nails into the victim’s coffins.
Klebold and Harris bear the responsibility for
their slaughter, but you cannot ignore the sway
of ignominy foisted upon them by an inflexible
and corrupt system that attempts to mold everyone
into the same shape.
Columbine’s pain should stay squarely in
the hearts of those who let it happen. But don’t
forget what happens when you push an animal into
a corner—it bites back.
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