Page A5
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JUNE 3, 1998
(The ^J or liait b © bseruer
It Does Happen There, Too
Bv H i gh B. P rice
P resident
N atio n al U rban L eague
The images of the mayhem that
tore apart Springfield, Oregon
are by now familiar to us all, no
matter how faraway we live from
the six suburban and rural com
munities where since last Octo
ber heavily-armed teenagers have
gunned down a total of nearly
three score of their classmates
and teachers.
The toll is stunning: Pearl,
Mississippi, 3 dead, 7 wounded;
West Paducah, Kentucky, 3 dead,
5 wounded; Jonesboro, Arkan
I sa s, 5 dead, 10 w ounded;
Edinboro, Pennsylvania, 1 dead,
3 wounded; Fayetteville, Tennes-
. see, 1 dead; and now. Spring-
fie ld , O regon, 4 dead, 26
wounded.
Familiar, too, is the grief of
the survivors and the shock of
residents of these individual com
munities, and many of us in the
larger society, which has fol
lowed each of these murderous
rampages. Why is this happening
here? Is thequestion being asked
with increasing disquiet.
“There is no sense to it,” Gary
Bowden, the wrestling coach at
S p rin g fie ld ’s T hurston High
School, said last Thursday, strug
gling to cope with the enormity
o f the crime there.
But it’s not true that there’s
“no sense” to these killings.
In fact, many people have iden
tified the causes o f and contrib
uting factors to these seemingly
anarchic bursts of horrific vio
lence.
Norma Paulus, the Oregon
state superintendent of schools,
said in the wake o f the shootings,
“this is not a school problem.
This is a societal problem."
John K itzh ab er, O re g o n ’s
G overnor, pointedly asserted,
“All o f us should look at how we
have failed as a society and how
this could happen in the heart of
Oregon. It has been a priority to
build prison cells and prison
beds--after the fact. These ac
tions in no way prevent juvenile
violence.”
Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith,
o f the Harvard School of Public
H ealth, suggested on A B C ’s
“Nightline” last week, that we
are seeing the “second wave" of
the youth homicide epidemic that
Salem Residents
surprised with Ava
lanche of Prizes
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That ticket, from the May 13, drawing,
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vides Megabucksjackpot winners w ith
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Clinton’s winningticke, was purchased
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Clinton, 44, became the Oregon
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Clinton purchased 10 sets of numbers,
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There were more surprises in store
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headquarters. “It’s amazing how your
whole life can change in such a short
time,” said Clinton
primarily convulsed black and
Hispanic inner-city neighbor
hoods during the past 15 years
now erupt in white small towns
and rural communities.
“ 1 he late 80s. early '90s was
when the youth homicide rate in
urban America almost doubled,
started with what one might have
thought were isolated incidents,"
Dr. Prothrow-Stith explained.
"Eventually, we learned to un
derstand that that was an epi
demic," she continued. "I can’t,
as a public health person, look at
w hat's happened in schools over
the last six to eight months and
say these are isolated events. 11
you take troubled kids and add
guns and add a precipitating
event in a society that glam or
izes explosive responses to an
ger, you’ve got danger and I think
it’s now happening pretty much
across the country."
Many experts on children and
adolescents believe that dynamic
is helping to fuel the extraordi
nary callousness and the calcu
lated indiscrim inate ferocity
shown by these young killers.
Sissela Bok, a philosopher and
ethicist w ho has studied v iolence
in America, told the New York
Times, last week, "We have
movie role models showing vio
lence as fun, and video games
where you kill, and get rewarded
for killing, for hours and hours.
It is a very combustible mix: en
raged young people with access
to semiautomatic weapons, ex
posed to v iolence as entertain
ment. v iolence shown as excit
ing and thrilling."
But the situation is far from
hopeless, the successful effort
by public agencies, private insti
tutions and community organi
zations in Boston to reduce that
city’s climbing youth homicide
rate is just a piece of the volumi
nous quilt of evidence that we do
know how to help great numbers
of young people live their ado
lescence in productive fashion.
The current spasm o f horrific
school v iolence is another warn
ing that American society must
intensify its efforts to do so.
Finally, there is another point
about these murderous incidents
that cries out for notiee--a point
that becomes clear if one imag
ines it had been African-Ameri
can youths in six different inner-
city neighborhoods who had
turned their predominantly-black
high schools into killing fields.
We know' what “ answ ers"
would have been put forth--and
what blame assessed--then. We
know that we would have been
subjected to the purplest "mean
streets of the ghetto" prose then-
-prose that is used to implicitly
declare the problems of the inner
cities a “Negro Problem" which
has nothing to do with White
America.
fhe public discourse about
these killings is entirely differ
ent precisely because it is not
black children but white ones who
are showing the horror a deep
alienation from society can pro
duce.
W e should examine w hy some
white youths who are not poor
are having and acting out mur
derous impulses--not to play the
racial "dozens," hut to determine
what commonalties and differ
ences exist in how the dynamic
of violence operates in those
places where violence is expected
to happen and in those places
where it's not supposed to hap
pen.
fo do otherwise would be to
ignore the overwhelming evi
dence that the 'mean streets' pro
duced by the dynamic of vio
lence in American culture can in
fact be anywhere.
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