This post also appears today as a guest article at The Daily Clarity.
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School Massacre. The mainstream media already have their retrospectives, their “where are they now” pieces, and their terribly thoughtful commentaries all put together and ready to bombard us with. Meanwhile, over the past month and a half a string of mass killings and murder-suicide incidents has taken more than twice as many lives as were lost in Littleton, Colorado that April day. Fourteen people diedjust as a result of the mass killing in Binghampton, NY two weeks ago and the latest incident over the weekend involved a Maryland man killing his wife and three young children before taking his own life. News coverage of such incidents has become so commonplace that the Maryland story barely registers in the collective consciousness of the media. Also in the last several weeks, the Department of Homeland Security released a report finding a significant rise in the activity of right-wing extremist groups. Despite receiving criticism for being “inflammatory”, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano justified the need to release the report before it could be bowdlerized to avoid such criticism because of the urgency of the issue — the growing likelihood that what is random violence on the part of disturbed individuals could snowball into organized violence on the part of disaffected groups united by their self-feeding paranoia and realized by hair-trigger situations.
Our cultural obsession with the potential for terror caused by the mysterious “other” — al Quaeda, Iran, Somali pirates — has rendered us nearly blind to the reality of the terror that we instill from within. The threats from outside remain nebulous at least and utterly imaginary at most, while the possibilities of violence against innocent people from disturbed individuals and groups within our own communities realize themselves with increasing frequency and horrifying regularity. Pundits and historians alike now commonly point to September 11, 2001 as the demarcation point for a new era in American society, yet few would choose April 20, 1999 or it’s almost-exactly corresponding predecessor, April 19, 1995 (the date of the Oklahoma City bombing), for the same milestone, despite the vastly more significant occurrence of violence against ourselves.
In a sense, our projection of the source of terror and violence onto whatever handy villain our leaders can provide is little more than an ages-old mechanism for focusing public attention to a political agenda; Americans have obediently changed the locus of their hatred and fear over almost a century from Germans to Japanese to Russians to Muslims as political expedience dictated. Indeed, the transition has been so seamless most of the time, that when the first President Bush needed a new villain, the effort of trying to pick one between Manuel Noriega, Muammar Gaddafi and then ultimately Saddam Hussein was almost comic. But the buffoonish machinations of governments and politicians obscure a much more complicated problem. Our projection of terror onto “the other” is a significant denial of the growing manifestation of terror and violence as commonplace elements of our own society.
For the time being, it is possible to ease the visceral response to events like Columbine or the Binghampton shooting as the acts of people with psychological problems. The regularity of such events, though, speaks to a growing acceptance of the conditions that create those psychological disturbances and even an amplification of them to the point that they result in violent outbursts. Now, we are also told by the very agency created in response to the singular events of 9/11 that we are crossing a threshold from individuals acting out in fear, despair, and paranoia to the organization of groups who share many of the same characteristics. The metamorphosis of terroristic violence from lone gunman to motivated group may only require a very small push, and it is clear that there are people actively hoping to put themselves in the forefront of those groups. It is too easy to look back over the last ten years and see the individual incidents as they have become part of our national life. Ten years hence, how likely will it be that we will be able to begin the retrospective of the list of homegrown terrorist attacks that will form yet a new element of our society.
Since I wrote this article on Sunday night, there was yet another murder-suicide which took the lives of another family of five, as well as the arrest of a suspect in a string of assaults on prostitutes that resulted in one murder in a Boston hotel.
An interesting and thoughtfully written piece. Thanks for the perspective. And congratulations on being featured.
You’re right, of course. I heard something on the L.A. newsradio station comparing the stats on mass killings since Columbine to before Columbine — not surprisingly it’s through the roof. Sadly such things have become commonplace, and yeah, look to home before you look to international terrorists.