Lockdown and Breakdown

There have been several incidents at local high schools lately that show Waterloo Region is trying hard to keep pace with the world as it goes to hell. In the past two weeks alone,

• One secondary school went into lockdown upon the sighting of what were widely rumoured to be guns and machetes--but turned out to be steel pipes. Seven teens were charged.
• Another school was locked down for three hours when somebody spotted a man with a handgun on the grounds. The man was never located.
• Two neighbouring schools in Cambridge were locked down when someone was stabbed nearby.
• A teenager was arrested when a 'hit list' comprised of 25 names was discovered on MySpace.com.

To this litany we can add the cases that made national and international news because they turned out tragically: the Dawson College shootings, the Amish schoolhouse massacre, a mass shooting in Great Britain. Troll the news with a fine-mesh net and a day rarely passes without a school lockdown somewhere.

What the hell is going on?

When I was in school, we had fire drills twice a year. The object of those was to get everybody out as quickly and safely as possible. Now, schools practice locking everybody in...getting students into classroom corners far away from entrances, locking all doors, shutting the blinds, and waiting. Back as recently as the 1970s it was unheard of for somebody, student or otherwise, to go on a rampage at school. We had playground fights, many of them. They were invariably one-on-one affairs--to recruit "help" constituted a loss of honour so grave as to be unthinkable, no matter how bad you were being pounded. When the fight was over, it was over. Win or lose (and I usually lost), you knew where you stood. I can't speak for other bullied kids, but it never occurred to me to get myself a gun and fight back. I wouldn't have known where to find a gun, for one thing; now, it seems like kids can just pluck firearms out of their asses. More importantly, though, I knew without even thinking about it that punishment for any retaliatory action would be swift and severe. It wouldn't necessarily come from the justice system, either: my parents had their own justice system.

Now, of course, you wave a finger at your precious hoodlum and Children's Aid will gleefully interfere. Which would be fine, I suppose, if the courts would deal with youth violence in some meaningful way. Of course, they don't: one can only conclude that they have some very good reason for allowing people to be knifed/hacked up/gunned down. If only they would let us know what it was.

Yes, school is a very different place nowadays. If you so much as throw a snowball, you can be suspended, and you might be expelled if that snowball hits somebody. By that standard, I would have been expelled many times over. So would almost all of my classmates and not a few of my teachers. I suspect one ingredient in the explosion of violence is absurd zero-tolerance policies that punish kids for being kids.

Just as banning guns has done absolutely nothing to stop shootings anywhere it's been tried, banning schoolyard fights seems to exacerbate them. Hey, you're already gonna get expelled...you might as well inflict maximum damage. These days, you won't find an 'honourable' one-on-one fight that stays that way for long. Friends and friends of friends coalesce on both sides: gang warfare erupts because somebody looked the wrong way at somebody else.

Does violence on all those screens translate into violence in life? Back in media studies class in my idyllic high school, I remember researching a paper on the scourge of television and learning that within months of TV's introduction to a far north Inuit community, incidents of violence among people of all age groups had skyrocketed. I can say that television and videogames, at the very least, legitimize violence. As depictions of violent acts become commonplace, violence becomes banal; eventually--I have it on good teenage authority--evisceration is hilarious.

I've got my own theories for what has precipitated the mess we're in. Children who came of age in the "Me" Generation of the 80s were denied the chance to learn empathy, because their parents had decided empathy was for the weak. We're still seeing that today in many cases: there is a huge emphasis placed on academic success, athletic success, every kind of self-centered success there is. Win, win, win, and if others lose--so what? School shootings are that philosophy carried to its logical conclusion.

This will get a lot worse before it gets better, mark my words.