The Last Page
Willis, Ellen
NO SOCIAL movement can thrive without the energy of the emerging generation, and from this perspective the Columbine High School shooting was awful in more than the obvious way. Amid the...
...A few intrepid souls, noting the gender of every school shooter to date, even suggested that masculinism and homophobia might have something to do with the case...
...But what I want to know, and have heard virtually nothing about, is this: how do teenagers in "normal" middle-class suburbs feel, not only about their present lives but about the adult world...
...Plutocracy is...
...The Littleton generation is on its own...
...What do they think about their own prospects...
...Yes, we heard a lot about teenage culture, with its seemingly intractable hierarchies, cliques, and brutal exclusions...
...While the right celebrates the end of history, the left huddles in a corner hoarding scraps of the New Deal...
...In the eighties there were two highly publicized "youth violence" crises: escalating gang warfare among inner-city black kids and a wave of suicides among white teenagers in workingclass suburbs...
...How to get it back...
...Efforts to understand these events from their protagonists' perspective— like Do or Die, Leon Bing's report on gangbangers in L.A., and Teenage Wasteland, Donna Gaines's account of high school "burnouts" in Bergenfield, New Jersey—suggested that in different ways both groups were dying, literally and figuratively, of their lack of a sense of possibility...
...and hardly anyone argued, as they might have done had this been the first such incident, that these were just two psychopathic kids whose actions reflected on no one but themselves...
...That they would not want something else—if they could imagine what that something might be...
...Both these groups were losers, in terms of mainstream American criteria...
...With teeth-grinding superficiality, liberals demanded gun control, conservatives the posting of the Ten Commandments, while the usual coalition of pop-culture bashers blamed the media...
...Many others share their refusal, though few express it in spectacular crimes...
...Yet the spirit of the public discussion was mainly that of panicked prison guards who had lost control of the inmates...
...And here it should be noted that while boys have seized the gun, girls—from northeastern suburbs where legal abortion is readily available—have chosen to give birth and kill their infants...
...It was widely assumed that if mass murder was erupting in the heart of white, middle-class suburbia, some sort of social critique was in order...
...Amid the anguish, indignation, hysteria, and political posturing that followed the events in Littleton, what struck me most keenly was the silence: the eclipse of young people as social and political actors...
...what had they neglected to do?—and a hasty dropping of the subject when it appeared that their lives and child-rearing practices were more or less indistinguishable from their neighbors...
...ELLEN WILLIS 128 DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were losers too...
...Quiet despair is far more common than murderous rage...
...There was much curiosity (laced with schadenfreude) about the killers' parents —how could they not have known...
...These days we are constantly told that what is cannot be otherwise...
...That they had anything to do with setting those terms...
...They saw death as a logical extension of lives they could not imagine changing, and at the same time as the only choice that was truly theirs...
...But there is a crucial difference...
...They were not excluded from the shiny, happy opportunity society by virtue of their race or class, but because on some deep level they revolted against joining up...
...The notion that change of any but the most cautious, incremental sort is either necessary or possible is looney tunes...
...As for the winners, the jocks and cheerleaders and their ilk, can we assume that they're content with the terms of their victory...
...Social Darwinism is...
...Do they have any concept at all of having individual or collective power to influence their condition...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
