by Tom Barrett
Now that the sideline analysis from the broadcast and print media has died down, the families and friends of fifteen children and one teacher in Littleton, Colorado, are left to face their grief alone and in their own way. No doubt some of them are relieved that the spotlights are turned back to other things, but the pain felt by mothers and fathers whose children will never grow up is permanent and indescribable to those who have not gone through it. And in many working people’s communities, as in mine, is the nagging concern: it could happen here. We know it, almost instinctively. But we don’t know why, and worse, we don’t know how to prevent it.
In the days that followed the worst massacre ever to occur in an American school, “experts” from government, the educational bureaucracy, the medical profession, the police, and the clergy pontificated about why it happened and, for the most part, came up with conclusions which served their particular political agenda, whether that meant gun control, restrictions on the Internet, censorship of movies and television, school prayer, or what have you. What they demonstrated to the working people whose children attend the public schools is that those who are entrusted with our children’s safety are clueless in the face of a deepgoing crisis of the entire society, a crisis whose effects are intensified in the society of the young. Meanwhile, it is our children who are at risk. And none of us should live in the fool’s paradise of “it can’t happen to my kids,” or “I made it through; so can they.”
We will probably never know entirely what made Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold go on their shooting rampage at Columbine High School. An analysis of the boys’ mental health is beyond the scope of Labor Standard. In any case, a thorough analysis of their individual case histories added to the social factors behind their murder/suicide could easily fill several hundred pages.
What we can and must call to working people’s attention is the decay at the core of capitalist society even as American big business is reaping the most abundant profits in all its history. There are no easy answers or quick fixes. There are things we can demand from our employers and our government, such as free, universal, single-payer health insurance which completely covers psychiatric care; an education system that inspires children rather than alienating them; wage increases to the extent that a single weekly paycheck — without massive overtime — can support a family comfortably.
Those things speak to some of the issues involved in the Littleton tragedy. However, the basic problem behind the Colum bine shootings cannot be fixed by partial reforms. The only way to reverse the moral and social decay of capitalist society today is to transform it so that it is no longer capitalist society. Will that happen in time to stop the risk to our children now? There is no way. But if the young people in this country begin to see that a new movement for social change is growing, a new sense of hope can begin to reverse the years of alienation which is a primary factor in the epidemic of school violence going on today.
Victim of Littleton shooting being taken into surgery. Millions of parents are wondering,
“Could this happen to my son or daughter?”
School Violence in the Suburbs — the Media React
Workers who live in urban areas, especially African American and Latino workers, have been contending with youth violence for many years, and some have complained that the issue never got much attention until it affected white youth in affluent suburban communities. There is considerable justice to the complaint, which speaks to the fundamental racism of a society which values the lives of poor children of color as less important than those in a community like Littleton, Colorado.
There are some differences, however. First, the youth violence of the urban centers is essentially part of the overall problem of city crime, which is decreasing, if police figures are to be believed. Violence perpetrated by youthful offenders has not shown the same decrease as crime as a whole; however, no urban school district has seen a death toll even close to that of Littleton, let alone the combination of Littleton, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Springfield, Oregon, and Paducah, Kentucky.
Second, the brutalizing daily violence in the hallways and school buses of the urban schools is as well a daily feature in suburban communities; the perpetrators of the Littleton massacre were its victims, and their act was one of horrible retribution against their perceived tormentors.
Thirdly, and tragically: many working people, including working people of color, have fled the major cities in the hope of finding safer, cleaner, and generally more pleasant environments in which to raise their children. High among their concerns has been the quality of the public schools. What they have found is that in spite of the propaganda from local politicians and business leaders — especially in real estate — the same problems affecting urban schools in poor districts exist in the wealthier suburbs as well.
There are dedicated, caring teachers in both urban and suburban districts; however, in neither environment are they supported by the public school bureaucracy, which is in turn dominated by the same business interests which control government as a whole. One difference is that the suburban schools are not short of “stuff”: their classrooms have the up-to-date computers, audiovisual gadgets, new textbooks, and science laboratory equipment, to which the city districts do not have access. Ironically, the urban schools are better supplied with “stuff” of a different kind: security equipment. Students attending inner-city schools have told reporters that they actually feel safer in their schools than they would feel in suburban schools like Columbine High.
The Easy Answers — and False
Inevitably, spokespeople for varied political agendas are putting their own spin on the Littleton events in order to justify their particular “solutions.” For the most part, their so-called analyses are little more than self-serving exercises and contribute little to our understanding and less to any solution to the problem.
One analysis which has received relatively little press attention has to do with Harris’s and Klebold’s fascination with Nazism and the racist harangues which Harris posted on his Internet website. It deserves more attention than it has received — not because it provides any useful insights but because it addresses a concern which is important to the labor movement, to people of color, and indeed to all seeking to make progressive social change. The issue is right-wing violence and the danger of fascism.
Fascism, properly speaking, is not a danger today. That is not to dismiss ultraright terrorism, which is a very serious danger today, nor is it to minimize the threat posed by hate groups attempting to capitalize on working people’s dissatisfaction with their standard of living and union leadership. However, there is virtually no possibility at this time that the U.S. government will be overthrown and replaced by a Hitler-style dictatorship.
“Fascism” was the name given by Benito Mussolini to his black-shirted right-wing goon movement in Italy during the years following the First World War. Mussolini, a former Social Democrat who had supported the Italian government’s war effort, became a fanatical Italian nationalist after the war and organized gangs to carry out physical violence against “traitors” — that is, supporters of the newly-formed Communist International, which rejected nationalism in favor of working-class internationalism.
Mussolini’s power base was among small businessmen and low-level civil servants, and his fascist movement organized unemployed street youth into “Combat Groups” (“fasci di combattimento” in Italian), dressed them in black uniforms (hence the name “Black Shirts”), and sent them to do battle with revolutionary socialists and militant trade unionists.
In his speeches Mussolini called for a revived Roman Empire, and his supporters carried bundles of wooden sticks (called “fasces” in Latin), which had been carried in triumphal processions for the Roman emperors.
In Italy in the early 1920s, as in the rest of Europe, militant workers were inspired by the successful Russian Revolution of 1917 and sought to duplicate it in their own country. Though Italy had fought on the “winning” side in World War I, its economy was devastated, and its government was seriously weakened. The opportunity for a successful revolution, to overthrow the monarchy and establish a workers’ republic, was promising indeed. The Italian employing class doubted its ability to retain power through purely legal means, and a number of business leaders and monarchist politicians gave political and financial support to Mussolini’s movement, which went outside the law to fight the unionists and socialists in the streets. In 1922 King Victor Emanuel appointed Mussolini prime minister. (Writing about fascism as a class phenomenon, Leon Trotsky pointed out that it is a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie ruined by the economic crisis of monopoly capitalism. These “petty bourgeois gone mad” direct their fury, not against the big capitalist businesses, but against the organized workers movement.)
Roughly a decade later, Adolf Hitler followed a path to power in Germany similar to the one Mussolini’s fascist movement had followed.
The Italian government in 1922 and the German government in 1933 were weak and unstable, presiding over war-ravaged economies. The possibility of their overthrow by the revolutionary working class, inspired by the Russian example, was strong. How different is the situation in the United States today! The American employing class is enjoying the greatest profits in all of history, and its political power is unquestioned. Organized labor — or rather a left wing of organized labor — has only three years ago launched its own political party, and that party is not yet strong enough to run a credible election campaign, let alone contend for power. The American ruling class does not need to turn to a violent fringe movement; in fact, the Republican Party leadership has begun to distance itself from the more fanatical right-wing forces which helped it elect Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. There is no mass fascist movement based on a ruined and infuriated petty bourgeoisie in the United States at present.
A few individual racist and sexist fanatics, driven to a desperate frenzy by their “betrayal” at the hands of the political establishment, have turned to terrorism. Though there is virtually no danger of their overthrowing the government or anything close to it, they have real weapons which kill real people, sometimes one at a time, like abortion provider Dr. Slepian in Amherst, New York, or sometimes by the hundreds, as in the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. For that reason, they are a serious threat and must be fought by all effective means.
It does not appear that Eric Harris — and Dylan Klebold, who seems only to have been following the older boy’s lead — was fundamentally motivated by any political agenda. Unlike Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombing, Harris’s anger was directed not at a perceived tyrannical government but primarily against a perceived tyrannical clique of athletes and cheerleaders at Columbine High.
His anger, if not his actions, were somewhat justified, according to statements by other students. The ravings on his website were half-baked and inconsistent, espousing racist ideas one week and denouncing them the next. His attraction to Hitler appears to have been more motivated by a desire to attract attention — even negative attention — to himself, than by any real agreement with Nazi ideology.
To be sure: someone with Harris’s psychiatric profile could indeed be drawn into a real fascist cult and perhaps even lead one. There is no question that Adolf Hitler’s own personality profile was a factor in the Nazi movement’s evolution and the holocaust that ensued. But to be a leader, one must have followers: the historical factors which caused millions, instead of one misguided fellow student, to follow Hitler are not present in the United States today.
Other facile answers which have been put forward have to do with gun control, increased school security, parental responsibility — or lack of it, violent video games, and even school prayer. None of them stand up to scrutiny. Legal restrictions on firearms have in no way been relaxed over the period that school violence has increased. On the contrary, guns have always been easily accessible in the United States, and, though our society has certainly always been a violent one, the epidemic of children shooting children is something new. There was an armed guard on duty at Columbine High, and clearly his presence failed to deter Harris and Klebold.
Without question, the economic necessity of two incomes for most working families puts an additional strain on parents. The notion of “quality time” — setting aside a particular time of the day for parenting, almost like a busy executive making an appointment — is clearly nonsense, put forward by spokespeople for big business to justify their increasing demands on employees, especially women employees. However, evidence does not support any charge that either Harris’s or Klebold’s parents neglected their sons. Eric Harris had been put under psychiatric care some time before the shooting incident and had been prescribed anti-anxiety drugs.
Violence as an American Institution
One line of thought which deserves to be taken seriously is that the Columbine
shooting is one result of the culture of violence, and indeed the veneration of firearms,
that has prevailed in the United States since colonial times. One of the best articulations
of this view is presented by Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is facing execution for a murder he did
not commit. He writes: “We live in a nation which was weaned on the mother’s milk of dark
and bitter violence, and of an ethnic cleansing that was a pattern of those to come. We live
on land fed by Indian and African blood, sweat and tears, and white-washed away as if it
never really happened. We live in a nation that is bombing civilians with joyous alacrity,
all the while crowing, ‘collateral damage’; ‘collateral damage,’ as if these words justify
the killing of innocents on a bus, or in a house who are guilty of nothing but being in a
country that NATO is determined to pulverize for imperial interests. It has been fourteen
years since the infernal bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia, and to date, not a
single killer cop has ever seen a single charge for the most premeditated of murders
against men, women, and babies.
“In this nation, young boys grow up learning that there are several kinds of violence,
state violence, and personal violence; and state violence is okay. Why else would one of
the killers of Columbine have sought, unsuccessfully, to have joined the Marines several
days before the carnage? Unable to participate in the state’s violence, the boys gleefully
engaged in personal violence, and instead of being called a ‘hero’ for killing the enemy,
they are called ‘killers’ for killing their classmates.
“Meanwhile, the reasons and motivations are ignored, only the acts, as if they stand alone,
inviolate. And, in this age, when images flit across nations at the speed of light, aren’t
motivations important?
“They are not monsters, but boys of an America where legalized violence is bred in the
bone. They are truly America’s children. And they are but a harbinger of what is to come.”
What Mumia writes is true, and his points are well taken. But even his comments fall short with respect to Littleton and the overall problem of violence and alienation among adolescent youth in the United States. As he himself states, the culture of violence which pervades American society is older than the Republic itself; it was certainly present in previous generations, including the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s when millions of young people took to the streets to protest war, racism, and repressive violence, among them Mumia himself and the author of this article.
Why has there been, according to Time magazine, a 300% increase in teen suicide since the 1960s? Why has there been a 1,000% increase in pediatric depression since the 1950s? Time author John Cloud also points out that on average, children spend eleven fewer hours with the parents per week than they did in the 1960s, and that the typical adolescent spends 3˝ hours alone per day. Are these factors contributing to youth alienation and violence? What changed in thirty years to produce such an increase in self-destructive attitudes and behavior?
Social Disintegration at the Most Basic Levels
A thoroughgoing analysis of youth alienation and its causes could easily fill a book or even several volumes. And it is hardly new with this generation of adolescents — over forty years have passed since James Dean’s performance in the film Rebel Without a Cause defined youth discontent in post–World War II America. Nevertheless, some of the sociological factors which have contributed to the deterioration of children’s lives deserve some attention, even if we are unable to analyze them in depth here.
Prior to the Second World War, nearly all Americans lived in communities where people’s social relationships extended beyond their immediate families and fulfilled a number of social needs. The majority of Americans lived in small rural communities, where everyone knew everyone else, and in some cases were related to many of their neighbors. Working-class urban neighborhoods had a social integration that was different, but no less strong than that in the country. Labor Party Organizer Tony Mazzocchi described in an interview on National Public Radio the neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up, where the social relationships of the community were evolving into genuine class consciousness. Any resident foolish enough to cross a picket line during a strike would have been well advised not to show his face on the street and would have had a difficult time facing people in the shops or churches.
Irish-American author Frank McCourt, in his book Angela’s Ashes, recounts how neighbors in his apartment building fed him and his younger brothers when their alcoholic father had squandered his wages on whiskey. In Harlem people organized “rent parties,” where local jazz musicians would play to benefit families who were facing eviction from their homes, and if a family was evicted, often their neighbors would carry the furniture back from the street to the apartment, in an elementary form of class resistance.
Following World War II, while the government persecuted labor militants with the McCarthyite witch hunt, the old communities, both rural and urban, were being broken down and transformed into the suburban-based society we see today. Small family farms by the thousands were sold off and developed into suburban housing, where home ownership was made available to workers and returning veterans at prices and interest rates that they could afford. Though the real estate developers’ primary purpose was to make millions of dollars in profit, some expressed a conscious motivation to create class peace by breaking up the old urban neighborhoods and saddling working-class families with mortgage debt and home maintenance work. William Levitt, the developer of the famous “Levittown” on Long Island, New York, remarked, “No man who owns his own home can be a communist. He has too much to do!”
It nearly backfired. Though the attempt to housebreak the trade unions and impose class peace on the economy by and large succeeded, postwar suburbanization had social and political consequences that the employing class had not foreseen. To begin with, first among the small farmers forced off the land and into cities were African Americans, who in many cases moved into the old urban neighborhoods in the northern states. The result was a radicalization of the African American population, beginning in the southern cities with a struggle for civil rights, and culminating in the northern cities with violent confrontation with the National Guard and police.
The African American struggle directly inspired student youth, swelled by thousands of the sons and daughters of working people, the first generation of their families to attend college. Accepting as good faith the patriotic rhetoric coming from political leaders like John F. Kennedy, university students dedicated themselves to making their country a better place, and as they became educated about why racism and poverty existed, they began to draw radical conclusions.
They in part rebelled against the mind-numbing conformity of postwar suburbanization and aspired to build a world without corporate ladders to climb, picket fences to hide behind, and Joneses to keep up with. Their radicalization contributed greatly to the first major military defeat suffered by the United States (the Vietnam war) and helped to force two presidents from office.
However, the youth radicalization could not sustain itself for very long after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975; though it accomplished a great deal in terms of social reform, it did not bring about the complete restructuring of the political and economic system which is required to create a fair and equitable society and ensure lasting peace and justice. And for that reason, all of the negative consequences of post–World War II suburbanization were intensified, with a devastating impact on this country’s youth.
When John F. Kennedy said in 1961, “Ask not what your country can do for you; rather, ask what you can do for your country,” he was being a total hypocrite, but thousands of young Americans took his words seriously. But in the late 1970s that kind of idealism was no longer fashionable. It was replaced by a relentless drive to acquire material possessions: not so much because they brought happiness — indeed, they did not, no more in the 1980s and ’90s than in the 1950s — but because they symbolized “success.” A joking bumper sticker read, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins”; the sad part was that young adults, many of whom were soon to be come parents, were taking it seriously. Those who dared to criticize the revived religion of conspicuous consumption were derided as “throwbacks” and reminded that “the sixties are over.”
The feminist revival of the 1970s won many new opportunities for women in the workplace, and that was a genuine victory. Within the feminist movement, however, were women who argued that their struggle had to go further, to win the recognition that those women — and men as well — who chose to devote their time to domestic labor, including child-rearing, were performing a socially necessary service and deserved compensation for it. Unfortunately, that view did not prevail, and indeed such a demand has far-reaching and revolutionary implications for the capitalist power structure.
At the same time, the steady wage gains that the labor movement had enjoyed from the 1940s to the 1960s came to an end. The wage freeze of 1971, the recession of 1974, and the hyperinflation of 1979 wreaked havoc on workers’ living standards. By the early 1980s it was virtually impossible for a young working person to support a family on a single income. The 1970s also saw sharp increases in divorce and single motherhood, as the social stigmas associated with both virtually disappeared — positive changes, to be sure, but changes for which the economic structure was not prepared, and divorced and single mothers were working long hours for inadequate pay, trying to keep their children fed, clothed, and sheltered.
The end result has been that an entire generation of children has grown up neglected. It must be said. Are working mothers at fault? No, for the most part they have been working out of sheer economic necessity, because they are either their children’s sole support, or the family needs two incomes to meet its expenses. Are two-income families at fault? No, working people deserve more than simply the bare necessities of life. Is the employing class at fault? No, there is no evidence that any decisions were made in boardrooms to force parents to abandon their children to inadequate daycare and preschools.
The fault is with the overall evolution of the capitalist economy itself, over which society and its political institutions does not have control.
Have all children born since 1977 been neglected? Of course not. Everyone will be able to give examples of children who have grown up loved and happy, regardless of their economic circumstances. Have all parents since the late 1970s been driven by acquisitiveness? Certainly not, again. No one would be so stupid as to make such sweeping generalizations. But this is incontrovertible: for the past twenty years, the structures for providing physical and emotional care and intellectual and moral education for children have been woefully inadequate. In spite of individual parents’ best efforts and intentions, society as a whole has failed its young.
The Devastating Consequences of the Reagan Counterrevolution
It has been written that he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. In 1980 the employing class turned its political leadership over to Ronald Reagan, with the understanding that he would douse whatever embers of the radicalization still smoldered, inflict stinging defeats on the organized labor movement, and restore not only U.S. military might in the wake of its defeat in Vietnam, but restore the U.S. population’s political will to make war.
Though Reagan himself was little more than a public relations spokesman, as he had been throughout his career, his administration was by and large successful in its aims. In the aftermath of the Iranian hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan campaigned to give war a chance. In movie theaters, actor Sylvester Stallone portrayed a Vietnam veteran pursued in the woods by an evil government bureaucracy in the film First Blood. His character, John Rambo, wearing bandoliers over his broad bare chest, became the new American action hero, and Reagan extolled him in his speeches.
The gun, and the individualistic patriot who exercises his Second Amendment right to carry it, was exalted, to the delight of the National Rifle Association. Those who reminded us that war is a horror from which little good ever results were again derided as “throwbacks.”
This is the social and cultural atmosphere in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold grew from infancy to adolescence. Their parents may have attempted to give them the best possible care and upbringing — we don’t know much about the individual circumstances of the boys’ family lives — but the parents had no more control over the overall cultural and social values growing out of the Reagan period than they had over the air that their boys breathed.
So that there may be no misunderstanding, let us repeat: the overwhelming majority of high school students are not troubled youth who blow their classmates away with assault rifles. The vast majority of parents are working hard to give their children the best possible upbringing under difficult circumstances. But the circumstances are considerably more difficult than they were a generation ago. And not only are more young people at risk than in previous generations, the dangers to those at risk are greater than they were.
Eric Harris was under a psychiatrist’s care and was taking an anti-anxiety medication at the time of the Columbine High School rampage. There is no evidence that adolescent mental illness has significantly increased over the years. What has increased, however, is the danger facing the child who has psychiatric problems. Drugs, alcohol, and weapons are readily available, and the support system that every child needs is lacking, because of overstressed families and bureaucratized school systems.
Adolescence has always been a difficult period of life, but children who would have survived it a generation ago often do not survive it today. Something needs to be done, and our children can’t wait.
Young People Need Hope for Building a Better World
Bill Clinton and Al Gore repeat in their speeches the same idealistic phrases that the Kennedy brothers used to inspire a generation of young people in the 1960s. The difference is that today’s youth know they are lying. They know that they are not looking forward to a world that will be better than the world in which their parents came of age. Most tragically, they don’t believe there is anything they can do about it.
Most young people are opting for an individual solution, as they must, going to work in the gas station, corner drug store, or fast-food joint to earn enough money to continue their education. They are in far less of a hurry to move out of their parents’ homes than young people of the 1950s and 1960s were, and the parents are often just as happy to keep them home, where they can save their money for the future instead of paying out exorbitant rent in unsafe neighborhoods. The great majority will survive and take their places in the technology-dominated economy which is evolving today.
They deserve better than that.
The transition from childhood to adulthood should be more than just survival, though one might say that surviving adolescence today is a genuine achievement. No, youth should be a time of excitement, of new ideas and experiences, of risk-taking, of passionate romance and inseparable friendships, of being part of something bigger than one’s individual life. And whenever great changes in history have occurred, they have all required the energy of the young generation to bring them about.
But the young need guidance; they need heroes to look up to; most of all, they need a vision of the future, something worth striving for. And as important as it is to fight for universal health care, a higher minimum wage, trade laws which preserve workers’ jobs, and many other needed reforms, maybe, just maybe, we owe the future generations a broader vision of what this world can be, and maybe, just maybe, we should dust off our youthful idealism at times other than memorial meetings for comrades and friends who have died.
A Vision of a Better World
We can look back on the past twenty years and say: Look at the state to which the capitalist ethic of greed has brought the world. Are we proud of it? Has it made the world safer, cleaner, or fairer? Is this the future we wish for future generations? No, it is not we who are the “throwbacks.” It is those who would defend a system built on privilege for a few and poverty for many who are the creatures of the past. It is those who promote individual greed instead of human solidarity who are not relevant to the future.
We are proud of our ideals: peace, justice, a fair distribution of the world’s wealth, and a safe and clean planet to inhabit, and they are realistic. In fact, without them, the human species has no future at all.
Social revolution will not happen before today’s high school students become adults. But it is not too late to impart a vision of hope for a new and fair society, and we can give them the confidence that they can succeed where prior generations have failed. They deserve nothing less.
