Yet another editorial about school shootings must now be written.
These stories, along with the all too vivid television images of children sobbing, have become somewhat routine in this country.
Despite statistics that show the murder rate amongst teens is on the decline, scenes like the ones in Santee, Calif., are the alarms that jolt us into recalling that one child gunned down is far too many.
America, hands clenched in fists of rage, demands to know whom to blame. The unfortunate answer is you and me.
We live in a violent culture that lies within a violent world. Not a day goes by on this planet that some nation, somewhere, finds it noble to kill the people of another.
It should, then, come as no surprise that children imitate their elders, and conclude that violence and gunplay will solve their problems.
The grand, gloried United States of America is just as much to blame for this attitude as China, Cuba, or some far-away, oft-dismissed African country.
Just weeks ago, we dropped bombs on Iraq, not because they had bombed us into a position of self-defense, but because they were flying their planes in airspace we had designated as “off limits.”
In the judgment of the defense department, the lives of the three civilians killed were weighed against the sanctity of the “no-fly zone.”
America played the bully, a term familiar to anyone who has ever spent but a day in school.
For as long as the educational system in this country has been running, schools have passed off teasing, taunting, and in many cases outright assault as “normal childhood behavior,” or “just another part of growing up.”
Too often, administrators have simply let the biggest and strongest of the children exact tyranny unchecked.
As a result of such bullying, students band together in rival sects, just like countries do in the “real world” or contestants do on Survivor.
These same students, in their history classes, then learn all about what tribes like these have done and continue to do in the world when an impasse is reached – world leaders deem it appropriate to send thousands of people deemed expendable to kill the thousands of people deemed expendable by the other country.
Remember, the same country that seems to pour its hearts out for the children slain at Santana and Columbine High Schools never shed a tear when their military bombed children in Germany, Korea and Vietnam.
Precedent also shows that this country would have given the very same perpetrators of these school shootings a ticker-tape parade had their bullets pierced the hearts of people in the right country at the right time.
America tends to think highly of its gunmen who are a few years older and act in service of the military. What President Bush called an “act of cowardice” is often hailed as an act of valor.
As if to drive the point home, yesterday, just two days after the deaths in California, bullets wounded an eighth-grader in Williamsport, Pa. The alleged shooter was her classmate, another eighth-grader.
Schools are mere microcosms of the rest of society. Therefore, it has become quite obvious that the glorification of violence and bloodshed exists not only within the classroom but within our sick culture.
Until America and the rest of the world rejects this ridiculous notion that death is a solution, and gets rid of this culture of violence, bully-ism, and degradation of the individual, we will continue to have to deal with the consequences, and reap what we sow, however gruesome it may be.

Author