Rumours of gang activity spread and will soon die down. The truth hurts more than falsehood, in this case.
Can we learn anything from these two young men, one who will earn instant wings as a sweet angel, the other to be cast as the evil that stalked the halls of public education institutions?
Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god. [from here]
Where are the solution providers? Where are the lean, just-in-time, six-sigma/blackbelt, international quality standard setting heroes when we need them to e-file a report for a stop work order to fix the defects before they get shipped further down the assembly line?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it's broke, use duct tape first. If duct tape don't work, use a hammer. If a hammer don't work, prop it up on cinder blocks in the yard. If the weeds don't cover it by the end of the growing season, haul it to the junkyard, sell it to the scrap metal dealer or stick a fancy sign under it and call it art.
I remember the chaff being thrown out of the side of the combine we call the primary/secondary school system. I remember the people before me who've shown, through works of art, what happens to some of them in society. Not all the chaff is bad for society, though. Most of it serves useful purposes later in life that we just couldn't fit into the presized pigeon holes of conform-fitting socialised education.
So, can we learn anything from this example of fatal violence? I actually believe we can (actually or factually? word choices!).
I knew some of the violent kids who attended grade school with me. I played ball with some of them and one of them, a neighbour of mine, was the head of the unofficial neighbourhood gang, complete with clubhouse in the woods and us getting initiated by having to steal from the local grocer's and pharmacy store, as well as showing a propensity for shoving around other kids in our school (I mentioned that before, didn't I?). The crimes got more sophisticated as we got older, with cheating in class and levels of theft escalating to house break-ins, vandalism and other unmentionables.
Facts are facts. All the good kids in school are not always good and all the bad kids in school are not always bad. We are complex beings, many able to adapt to different situations to keep from getting pinned down or caught doing either good or bad for too long. Many others maintain one set of good or bad traits with precision, twenty-four hours a day, not crossing the line to either side on purpose.
We are one people, all of us needed to keep us moving forward to the next moment. We will prevent catastrophes when we feel it benefits us. Otherwise, we live in a world of negative consequences for both good and bad actions. We cannot stop bad things from happening. The world's most safe driver may have cardiac arrest behind the wheel of an automobile and steer straight into a vehicle full of good, wholesome children on their way to provide blankets and food for homeless people who are unable to fully function in wage-earning social situations. Guns provide protection and guns provide means for random acts of violence - a finger or a hand can be just as deadly a weapon as a firearm when one knows how to use one's body parts to defend and attack.
As one people, it behooves us to avoid pushing people into the corner of a room with no room to breath just because they do not conform to our idea of what is socially acceptable. Instead, as intelligent beings, we should raise our heads up and look to find ways to expand our social network to provide positive reinforcement for those we, in our normal narrow field of view, do not know what to do with.
I don't know the alleged shooter and his family. I know about them through word of mouth (even in a metropolitan area of 300,000 people, it's a small community). This boy's life has veered away from any normal, long-term, positive contribution to society. He has above-average intelligence and had good grades in school. He comes from a family line not long in this country. What would his family's former home country have done with such a boy? I have looked at news sources around the world, including The Times of India, for information. One article pointed to a survey from an American university that showed depression and delinquent peers lead to youth violence. Another article "called attention to the need to examine which violence-prevention programmes aimed at youth aren’t working and get rid of them." And a third pointed to pervasive violence in Atlanta neighbourhoods that promotes a fear of dying young which then reinforces violent behaviour.
A spiky-haired fitness celebrity popularised the phrase, "Stop the insanity!" She's right. We cannot and will not stop violence in the world. But we can redirect violent behaviour like turning a rocket's programmed path from killing a large swath of our population to sending us (or our replicant equivalents) into space exploration trajectories.
Institutionalised, privatised incarceration of violent, misbehaving, out-of-control youth rarely works. It simply reinforces negative stereotypes. As we keep thickening the walls of public educational institutions, let us pay attention to what we're doing to both those we're keeping in and those we're keeping out. Early detection of youthful wanton behaviour and channeling those youths' energy toward constructive goals without negatively labeling the children as troublemakers is a laudable goal we all want to see. To repeat an oft-repeated phrase, it takes a village to raise a child - all children deserve the chance to be observed by us and encouraged to find a useful place on this planet to grow and to live. No matter what we do, though, some children will fall through the cracks and some children will excel despite our lack of best efforts.
What have we learned from this? We should not overreact. Increasing our security measures to account for the inevitable random act of violence will clearly demonstrate our society has issues that cannot be fixed with chain-link fences and metal detectors. Barriers only increase the chance of separating us into unseen modes of behaviour that will lead to a different set of social clashes later on.
We used to say the nuclear family was the ideal nurturing situation. Since then, we've learned every family has potential dysfunctional problems that exemplify, exaggerate and magnify society at large. The fix here is not to isolate or ostracise but to work with those who do not fit in, accepting the fact that one or two will elude even our Herculean effort to nurture or rehabilitate. Instead of spinning our cocoons tighter, let's reach out and offer a helping hand to those who do not know they need assistance or have tried all they can and still don't know what to do to steer a problem child into a place where the child feels useful. Otherwise, we'll end up like California which spends more on putting (and keeping) people in the prison system than educating those who have found a desire to be useful in any or all parts of society. I don't like socialised crime-and-punishment institutes any more than I dislike other forms of socioeconomic socialism.
Don't let ourselves get fooled into spending money where it's guaranteed to be wasted. Mob behaviour benefits no one and plays into the hands of those who use emotional appeals to get what they want. Separate your emotional response to one act of violence from what you think we should be doing in the long-term to make society better for all by reducing fraud and waste in government.
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