by Mumia Abu-Jamal
A young boy, just three years a teen, skulks to school, his soul boiling with alienation. In a matter of minutes, he shoulders a rifle, aims and fires, shooting his way into modern American history, a history that is distinguished of late by a grim, teenage fascination with death, guns, and the transformation of school grounds into killing grounds. Over 20 people are hit by gunfire, and Springfield, Oregon's Thurston High School becomes merely the latest site of this new American rite, a macabre rite of passage from one hell of hatred to the many hells of loss, of grief, and what might have been.
In a mere matter of months, we have come to a place in the national life where one word, one noun, one place name becomes a sound that resonates like an open sore on the psyche: Paducah - Jonesboro - Edinboro - It is now unnecessary to name the state, for no longer can we claim this is a Southern phenomenon. Nor is this an Eastern thing.
It is a distinctly American thing - A reflection of something deep and unseemly in the nation's very soul. The late black nationalist leader, Malcolm X, once shocked his audience when he ridiculed the popular term; down South!: "Down South? Why - long as you're South of the Canadian border, you're living 'Down South'"
Similarly, the growing spate of school shootings is not a geographical expression so much as it is a psychological one. In their heads, these kids feel as if they don't fit in, some too fat, some too short, some jilted by a girl, all feeling as if they are somehow losers in life's hectic race to a false and fleeting race to perfection. Little did they know that all kids feel out of place in the world: it's part of the terror and wonder of growing up.
But that doesn't tell us why such things happen. When these kids were 7 and 8 years old, they saw on every TV screen in the nation one of the most devastating bombings in the history of modern war being presented like a cool, new video game, and they probably heard big people (adults) boast about bombing those 'towel heads' back into the stone age"
As they aged, they saw cops dressed like an urban army storm a building in Waco, Texas, and were 8, 9 or 10 years old watching tanks encircle a few wooden buildings, that soon burst into flames. They learned that over 80 men, women and babies can be burned to death, because they were somehow 'weird'! They saw their government kill with impunity.
When they were about 11 years old they say the horrific Oklahoma Federal Building Bombing, with its deadly toll of over 160 people, mostly and perhaps most terribly, children, an echo of the carnage in Waco.
It is perhaps fitting for us to acknowledge here that kids aren't stupid, and this generation has access to more information than any in human history.
Their consciousness has been formed in a field of violence. When you don't like somebody, or if you have a beef with someone, hell, bomb 'em into the stone age! If someone's 'weird', well - kill 'em. (It's OK, the government does it!)
They are the truest reflection of America, one forged in dark and bloody violence, and like the proverbial canary in the mine, they warn us of the poison seeping into the soul.
Column Written 5/25/98
© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal
All Rights Reserved
[posted June 1, 1998]
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