The Folly of the Authority Paradigm

Was Columbine not enough of a wake-up call? When I dared to reveal my sympathies for the two high school students (Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, ages 17 and 18 respectively) who shot up their school and killed a teacher, twelve fellow students, and themselves, I was usually met with awkward silence, polite "welllll"s, or honest and civil but clearly unambiguous disagreement.

Well, my family was more sarcastic and antagonistic, but that's more about a history and interpersonal dynamic that's irrelevant here. It was not often - perhaps 2 or 3 times in '99 or 2000, as the tragedy was still smarting most of this country. My coworkers (at the time I was in the public school system working in special ed., now I delight in working at a collaborative for those students with severe special needs), at least those 2 or 3 with whom I felt comfortable enough and whom I respected enough to share my honest opinion when discourse went there, challenged me to ask what good those boys accomplished with this massacre.

I took that point with some pause, even as I had anticipated it, but mine was that the dye had been cast LONG before those lost individuals ever went to school on that desperately awful (and awfully desperate!) day with guns blazing.

That's what brings me to write on the subject of desperation today. Teenage desperation is surely a very large proportion of acts of crying out, although of course not exclusive within the lost and hurting community. It is also why I characterize such a monumentally tragic and undeniably destructive act as the Columbine massacre surely was as a "wake-up call". It is no trite or diminutive intent with which I frame that event in so potentially cliche'd a sentiment. No, indeed. For, as awful as this was, we still, as a sentient, evolved, and democratic society surely must have derived some important perspective, if not plain vanilla awareness for those among us with heads habitually in the sand, and a renewed (if bitterly so) commitment to pay attention and truly guide and help those looking to escape their hell.

And the first task with which we are charged is to examine that reality that it is *their* hell. For far too many of us folks who manage to have their lives together, or at least reasonably (or even just comparatively!) so, there is a tendency to preach that, it being their hell, it is their responsibility - their bed in which to lie or from which to rise and get up - all on their own, and with a sense of duty, obligation, and some absurd notion of satisfaction for having overcome life's natural hardships "with their own two hands" and landed "on their own two feet"!

In other words - the "bootstraps" speech.

You know the speech I mean. It's the "you gotta learn to handle your own problems and make your own way" speech. It's the same excuse cold hearts use when they cockily saunter past a jingling coffee can and/or a raspy but polite "spare change, please?" and mutter some arrogant quip about not "enabling laziness", or worse, a completely inept allusion to the principles of Skinnerian psychology with some version of the absurdly ignorant generalization: "if you reward it, he'll just keep doing it". I think you mean "Pavlovian", dumbass. Yeah, okay Sigmund! So if it weren't for all we softy liberals "feeding the bears" as you might as well put it, that guy would get up off his ass and solve his problems all on his own and become a part of "productive society" just like that!

Maybe that was part of the thinking of Phoebe Prince, a recent immigrant from Ireland and 15-year-old high school student from South Hadley, Massachusetts, who hung herself after enduring a long stretch of bullying that culminated on one hellacious January day with a surge of threats and taunts, not only in person, but via electronic media such as texting and internet social fora such as Facebook. The adults at that school were NOT blind or deaf to these goings-on, this having been reported on condition of anonymity. I needed no such confirmation, however. Speaking from loosely similar personal experience throughout the '80s, and now as one with some 16 years working in the K-12 classroom in a direct-service capacity, I can assure you that it was a calculated expediency which did and does force professional educators to keep a safe distance. No no - not safe for the children, as we sometimes try to convince ourselves, but for our own safety in terms of job security, and to minimize the risk of district and personal financial liability.

It's easy to point the finger when you have some distance from a problem. You're not obligated to fix it, and so it is very tempting to deny the social and moral responsibility to be decent and caring and generous and unselfish human beings, even when it inconveniences or burdens us!

Although it might seem noble or whatever to focus on helping "the children", which obligation we adults (usually!) acknowledge at least if not accept more so than our equally compelling mandate to do as much as we can to help lift up ALL those who need help overcoming an obstacle - be it disability, disaster, insolvency, abuse, illness or unjust denial of liberty and/or due process, it is a "nobility" nullified if we then indulge the urge to ignore the suffering of those not so rosy-cheeked and unweathered.

We as a WHOLE society need to accept the responsibility to say "Enough is enough!" and *refuse* to accept this notion that the victim in ANY arena has somehow carved his own path or any other cookie cutter excuse for the lucky masses to shirk THEIR responsibility - their *fault* in enabling, fostering - hell - WINKING at the cruelty done to certain others.

Let me here shine a light on the fact that children are not the one's charged with the duty and authority to affect the change where it counts. Yes, they can have an "influence" - but let's be straight and real, damn it! There's "feel-good" action and activism and "movements" - these are LONG waves whose crests and valleys may not even be felt by those of us who dropped our pebble, alone or with dozens or millions of others. That's democracy and culture and all that heavy, intangible and singularly unalterable "big" stuff. It's the mountains and oceans and nations.

But INDIVIDUAL human beings are being bullied and terrorized every day - not only by their peers, but by those with their own authority to exact an unjust hell on the victim of their choosing. Authority abused is authority forfeited! But movements and sit-ins and petitions won't change the actions of that socially maladjusted schoolyard bully, or gang of bullies therein. Voting and "living right" and "living well" will not correct the abuses of a cop whose power trip has stripped a decent citizen of his rights, his liberty, and his very sense of security and well-being.

And, more to the point - these longitudinal efforts will not restore justice to the school child who has hanged herself in grief and desperation and sheer lonely sadness. They will not restore justice, opportunity, trust, confidence, and physical, social, financial and legal security to that disabled man who has been bullied and dismissed by the system.They will not provide the remunerative, compensatory and punitive damages due (and due hard and certainly!) the violated citizen. Those INDIVIDUALS with the power have the responsibility to get the right stuff done - every day for EVERY citizen.

The guy whose stroke of a pen compels the actions of levels of teams under him - HE can and therefore is obligated to "git 'er done". That official with the social and positional leverage to compel the right thing - and thus conceive, at LONG last, a just and right outcome - has at LEAST the moral responsibility to act upon that rare and precious power.

It ain't about "gitting 'er done". It ain't about preaching a self-reliance or independence that only the foolish or lucky or arrogant actually *believe* they have met or achieved, and/or that any individual can accomplish said autonomy with enough "blood, sweat and tears".

That's folly. That's a myth and a fallacy that is blasted into smithereens the instant any real thought is put to it. It's a denial that one's own luck and success might just be due, at least in part, to some good fortune and good connections and good timing not ALL of which we earned but with which we or you or they were nonetheless bestowed. It is unfair in the extreme to assume that those who *have* deserve it, and that those who have *not*, deserve nothing. It's cruel and arrogant and selfish and inhuman.

And it's dead wrong.