Vice President Gore recently added his voice to the "national conversation" in which very many people are expressing a wide range of explanations for the Columbine HS shootings in Littleton, Colorado, April 20, 1999. Some explanations place blame on the availability of guns; others blame lack of school counselors, lack of parental involvement in kids' lives, weak laws and law enforcement controlling youth violence, violence in entertainment, in media, films and video games, lack of religion in schools, lack of religion in homes, lack of religion, and more. One particularly strident opinion holds that individual evil is the true cause.
No doubt many of these factors have in one way or another influenced recent outbursts of violence. In addition however, there is considerable official, institutional, violence which has become routine in the US. Societally the public acceptance of official violence has desensitized us and diminished our respect for the sanctity of human life. The victims of official violence are dehumanized and demonized as criminals, as the foreign enemy, or listed generically as "collateral damage." The individual tragedies of these damaged lives are simply ignored in mass media reports.
Official violence is so prevalent it has become routine; the connection to incidents such as the Columbine High School shootings is easily overlooked. Even while the speculation about the causes of the student's actions are going on, the US is daily bombing and killing civilians in Yugoslavia - on the grounds that we are redressing a greater evil. (The end justifies the means.) Over the past couple years the media has shown the US routinely bombing Iraq -for months on end. We are accused of causing the deaths of 3,000 Iraqi children each month through the hardships imposed by our embargo on trade with Iraq. In these and other instances, the US has legitimized the killing of innocent civilians by saying "collateral damage" is unintentional.
Bombing was also the US choice of revenge in retalliation for the August 7,1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobe, Kenya . Suspected terrorist bases in Sudan and Afganistan were bombed on August 21, 1998 - in violation of international law. The Sudan attack was based on a totally erroneous suspicion that a pharmaceutical factory was a chemical or biological weapons manufacturing facility. Eventually the US was forced by a lawsuit by the owner of the destroyed factory to unfreeze his assets since there was no evidence of weapons manufacture. The legal claim for the factory and the 30 people reported killed is continuing. There are many such examples of the US national policy to resort to violence to resolve international conflicts and to avenge perceived threats and actual attacks against US assets and citizens.
A second form of inculturated violence and denegration of human life is capital punishment. There are over 3500 people awaiting execution in death row cells in state and federal prisons in the US. We execute more people than any other country except China - which has over 4 times our population and makes no pretense of being a democracy, and Russia, which is approaching civil chaos. Add to this the fact that the death penalty remains a popular policy in the US despite many reversals of death sentences, totalling 79 since 1970, of innocent people who have spent years on death row. These cases reveal falsification of evidence, brutality, torture and murder by police, and widespread fraud and bribery of witnesses by prosecutors seeking convictions at all cost. In the state of Illinois alone, 12 death row inmmates have been recently exponerated after spending years facing execution.
Powerful lobbying groups of crime victims, many of them organized and directed by politically ambitious prosecutors, want harsh laws, executions, and long sentences for convicted criminals - even those who are children as young as 12 and 13 years old. These demands for extreme punishments are clearly made out of desire for revenge. Prosecutors have become adept in exploiting the spontaneous grief that naturally accompanies victimization, manipulating the generic anger of victims into a politically usefulforce.
Trials and investigations of police violence against unarmed or non-violent suspects (and non-suspects) are continually underway in cities across the country. Most recently and widely publicized there are the cases of Abner Louima and Amadiallo in NYC, and Tyisha Miller in Riverside CA.In the current NYC case of Abner Louima, police officer Jason Volpe has confessed to a revenge-motivated sexual assault and torture of the helpless, handcuffed Haitian immigrant. Several of Volpe's fellow officers are charged with assisting and covering up the crime. We all remember the graphic video of the 1994 police beating of Rodney King on the streets of LA.
Again and again, grand juries investigating such charges of police brutality, under the powerful influence of their prosecutor, return findings of justified force or homicide - in a wholesale exoneration of police use of excessive violence. We have legitimized vengence, resulting in an official condoning of violence as a payback for any behavior which is perceived by an officer as threatening. Much of the excessive force used by police is in response to irrational behavior by mentally ill individuals. With such official and popular acceptance of routine violence, it should not be surprising that young students such as Harris and Kliebold employ somewhat the same values carried to a tragic extreme in their attempt to avenge their reported harrassment by athletes and preppies.
We excuse war and capital punishment and unnecessary police killings as instances where the taking of human life is acceptable because we have the consensus of the society, or the majority of voters, or the unanimous verdict of a jury - a still smaller number of citizens. When two boys are outcasts together, it doesn't take unimagineable craziness to convince them that they, alone, are a jury of two, a sovereign social group, acting in self defense. We should also not forget that suicide can be a form of revenge.
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