2001-03-05 - Night
WARNING: This is a rant. As such it is low on humor and high on anger. Read at your own risk.
With each new school shooting I find myself less and less sure who to hate--the excuse-makers whinging about how the shooter was picked on (as if that�s a perfectly good reason for blowing your classmates� heads off), or the NRA apologists and Bible-thumpers who go around blaming Marilyn Manson or video games or fluoridated water or whatever else will divert the public�s attention from the fact that 15-year-olds shouldn�t be able to get hold of firearms so easily in the first place, or the gun-control activists who immediately wonder aloud why we�re all not rushing to repeal the Second Amendment--as if the U.S. were Canada or Europe and not a country where trying to ban guns is as futile an endeavor as trying to ban drugs.
Wave one more agenda in my face right now and it�s going to take you three hours to shit it out tomorrow morning. For God�s sake, get the fuck off of CNN and give people a chance to grieve already.
I�ve been to Santee. Santee is a weird place. It�s one of those "wholesome," "family-oriented" communities that give me the creepy-crawlies when I have to pass through them. It�s a 3-D, interactive David Lynch movie. I can easily picture Frank Booth living there. It�s the sort of place where white folks have been fleeing for decades so they don�t have to deal with people who are different, only to wake up one morning to find themselves under the same roof with teenage kids who are bored, alienated, and armed.
It�s also a place where "you�d never expect something like this to happen," according to one newsdroid I saw on TV this morning. Oh, so this particular bland, conformist, emotionally repressed whitebread suburb only looks exactly like, say, Littleton?
The only thing I know for sure right now is that everything the media are telling us right now will turn out to be wrong. It took over a year after Columbine for the media to admit that, no, the two shooters in that case weren�t celebrating Hitler�s birthday or acting out a gay murder-suicide pact, they weren�t targeting jocks or blacks, they didn�t shoot that one chyk just because she told them she believed in God (although the truth about that hasn�t kept her from being canonized by the WWJD set)--they shot her, and everyone else, simply because they were a couple of evil, twisted-up little fucks who should have retroactively aborted themselves years ago and let someone else eat their food and breathe their oxygen. People like them give all Krelboins a bad name.
As for Santee, if the high school there is in fact a hotbed of pointless clique-based cruelty, then by all means, have the whole student body join hands in the cafeteria and sing Kumbaya and do whatever else it takes to root it out. But roast the gunman�s nuts just the same--along with anyone else in the future who pulls a piece and starts shooting because he�s depressed over being beaten at dodgeball.
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