COMMENTARY: Shooting their way out of childhood

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.) UNDATED _ To understand the recent epidemic of children shooting other children along with their teachers is no easy […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ To understand the recent epidemic of children shooting other children along with their teachers is no easy task. We have not lacked willing interpreters, however.


Our Great Explainers blame it on guns and our unreconstructed Wild West culture, violence in the movies, and on television. These pundits often call for new laws or regulations as their solution to what is happening.

Suppose, however, we try to enter the teenage world and to see it as they do rather than as we do. Mark well the notion that fresh legislation is prescribed as a remedy.

J. Walker Smith, co-author with Ann Clurman of”Rocking The Ages,”a book outlining America’s generational differences for marketing purposes, suggests members of what is termed”Generation X”_ those born since 1968 _ have grown up in an unpredictable universe.

Their childhood and adolescence, unlike that of their baby boomer parents, was marked by uncertainty and unpredictability. The news they heard told of layoffs, downsizing, the savings and loan debacle, the possible bankruptcy of Social Security, the crisis of authority in every institution from the White House to their own house.

Just ask yourself who the villains are in the movies in this post-Cold War age. They are, ironically enough, our highest government or corporate officials, clergymen and professors, traitorous generals and feckless cabinet officials. In the current ad campaign for the movie version of”The X-Files,”the teaser suggests”cover-up at the highest levels.” That does not add up to the reliable universe in which the optimistic, ready-to-spend, what-the-hell baby boomers made a stab at maturing. This generation has found a world that might betray you at every turn.

They have also experienced the excessive use of the law to solve problems other institutions could no longer manage. The Law became an authority substitute so neighborly disputes once settled in chats over the back fence now ended up as legal dialogues across the well of the courtroom. The judge decided when and if the World Series could begin; the judge decided how social policies should be implemented in the disastrous busing of school children; the Supreme Court became not only the examiner of the constitutionality of laws but the source of ethical and moral claims.

In short, the law has dominated America’s culture over the years in which this generation grew up.


Their world has been continually viewed as an unsafe place. Don’t climb the jungle gym in the playground. We’ll sue if you get hurt. Eliminate competitive games so children will never have to face winning or losing.

The Children’s Defense Fund can’t defend them from life. Indeed, it politicizes their childhood, taking it away from them. We do it all for the children.

Do we, really?

When we allow law to determine all of life, we are caught up in a Talmudic purgatory. For the law makes us basically suspicious of each other as it dilutes if it does not destroy trustworthiness between neighbor and neighbor, priest and parishioner, doctor and patient, and, of course, teacher and student.

Are we honestly surprised these conditions might breed children who do not trust the world they live in? Good families may make up for much of this in healthy children. It is the children, some from broken or disturbed families, who have been doing the shooting.

Others are clearly psychologically troubled. They are the ones least able to cope with an untrustworthy and menacing culture. And they break down before others do under such pressures. Poets and artists also feel the fracturing of culture before others feel it but they can paint and write their prophecies for us.

Long before our institutional forms broke down in the late 60s and 70s artists had made its breakdown their subject matter.


The surrealism of Salvador Dali seems tame stuff because it now matches so well the distorted world he foresaw half a century ago.

So, too, the less well-adjusted break down early. They are telling us a law driven culture, based on mistrust, is an intolerable state. These kids are trying to shoot their way out of it. Their prophecy tells us how a society that has substituted the law for ethics, morality, and common sense will become intolerable for everybody sooner or later.

DEA END KENNEDY

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