Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Littleton -- A Watershed for the Culture
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
May 1999 column for newspapersI started my professional life as a high school teacher. Anyone who has spent time with young people in what are for most of us the most difficult years cannot but agonize at the thought of those young bodies lying limp on the library floor in Littleton.
Examine the Culture
What has caused additional agony is the flood of agenda-running that has followed this tragedy. It seems that each writer knows that if only his or her theory had been followed, this tragedy could have been prevented. Religious people have not been absent among those with easy answers.The more we learn about the violence in Littleton, however, the more complex the problem appears, and it seems that we will have to take a fearless and thorough look at our entire culture.
What stands in the way of looking at how the totality of our culture shaped these horrible events seems to be our American addiction to blame, denial and displacement.
Blame
There is something comforting about knowing whom to blame. It's almost magical: anxiety disappears when we know whose fault something is. Knowing whom to blame provides a sense of closure, and, more important, makes it clear that somebody other than ourselves is responsible for what has gone wrong.As I surf the Net, I see working mothers, the NRA, permissive school officials, the entertainment industry, and even the gay community blamed for Littleton. In each case the impression is left that one particular group is responsible for what occurred.
The times call for us to suspend blaming (and the relief it brings), and take inventory of the factors in our nation's life that produce violence such as daily road rage and the extraordinary horror we still grieve over in Colorado.
Denial
Denial has been popping up every day since the first reports from Columbine School.Some people seem to dismiss everything from the Valentine's Day Massacre to Mi Lai as an aberration, and urge us to think about all the good people.
Gun-fanciers have been quick to point out that only two-tenths of one percent of all guns in the country are used in committing crime, as if that settled the gun question.
Usually very wise representatives of the women's movement seem unable to concede that the progress and justice women have achieved in recent years may have had some fallout on the way children develop.
No one is willing to admit that their cause -- or their usual way of doing things -- might have some tiny down-side. And so we have a kind of impasse, with progress prevented because of our difficulty of seeing the gray in most situations and working together to correct it.
Displacement
Our national tendency toward displacement is equally insidious. We know people who think they can save their marriage by having a child rather than by working on their relationship -- and pity such a child. If we let Littleton be about guns or parenting or school security, we lose the opportunity to identify and work on the complex of issues that erode our national life. A sneaky form of displacement is Rodney King syndrome, the mistaken belief that all that is required is for each person to try to be a little nicer to everyone, with no requirement to examine and overhaul values.A Watershed
While there is no way to find a silver lining in the tragedy of Littleton, and certainly no way to kid ourselves with rosy talk about people not "dying in vain," whatever that means, we have once again as a Nation received a wake-up call.The question before us is whether we will tether our sacred cows and set aside our financial and personal priorities long enough to look at the factors that threaten to destroy us as a people. At no time since the Civil War have we stood at such a watershed.
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