COLUMN: In the absence of answers

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99I went to seventh and eighth grade at Bailey Magnet School, a 95 percent black middle school/high school in Jackson, Miss. Because of various poorly veiled prejudices, Bailey was run-down externally and internally. For all the disrepair, at every door was an armed guard. Locker searches were daily and indiscriminate and it was hardly interesting when knives, drugs or even guns were uncovered. And when violence broke out in our overheated concrete world, it was upsetting but nobody was shocked. Even in tragedy, people are comforted when their assumptions and expectations are met. We make racial or economic justifications because they make us feel better. It's always easier to say, "Well, it was at an inner-city school, so it makes sense." For the two years I spent at Bailey, I accepted that school simply was a battleground. Littleton, Colo., is a quiet town. The median income is 25 percent higher than the national average. The community is more than 90 percent white. Columbine High School, right outside of Littleton, is large and well-funded,with green athletic fields and spacious grounds. And after this Tuesday, the Denver suburb will never be the same. When two students marched into the high school and opened fire, they took 13 lives before ending their own. But more than that, the students who survived the attack had their youth stolen from them. And the community of Littleton and the country as a whole lost its innocence. "It can't happen here." That's the easy answer people have used to console themselves as the number of school shootings across the nation has soared. From Oregon to Kentucky, regional boundaries have been irrelevant; the sizes of the towns and schools have been irrelevant. Sometimes the shooters have been misanthropic outcasts, as in Littleton, but other times, a veneer of popularity masked deep-seated problems. I dream that we could see things simply: Children with healthy upbringings should grow up decent. Schools should be a refuge, a place for support and enrichment. And idyllic communities should remain idyllic. But sometimes the outward shows of good breeding hide abusive families or dangerous obsessions. And schools are often sites of alienation and festering. Once the silence is shattered, how can we ever get the harsh ringing out of our ears. Our innocence is gone because the last 18 months, in which school shootings have left 27 dead and many more wounded, have eaten away at our trust. A belief that certain ways of life can only harbor decency now has been highlighted as the hypocrisy it probably always was. From the obvious danger zone of my early schooling experience, my brother now goes to a fine new school in southern New Hampshire. The grounds are spacious and the playing fields are verdant and well-maintained. The median household income is above the national average. And suddenly it doesn't seem so safe. Within the next month, classes will still end at Columbine High School. Students and teachers will go off for a summer trying to recuperate. And a legion of school board members, psychologists and sociologists will descend upon Littleton searching for answers. The trained professionals will try to find out where the school went wrong. And how a group of teens from supposedly nice families became killers. Why did nobody see it coming? Or, more chillingly, could anybody possibly have seen it coming? But finally, the problem is that we are always aware that no matter how much we try to rationalize, mourn, curse or pity, our response can only be hopelessly inadequate.