COLUMN: Opinion: Becoming numb to the pain

From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '00 From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '00A middle school student killed another student in homeroom less than a month ago. I don't know who was shot. I don't know where the middle school was. I don't know any names. So a boy was shot. I didn't know him. I didn't know the school. And it happens all the time. What's the point of reading an article you know will only resurface again with other names, other schools, other murderers? What's the point of caring if it doesn't change what happened? A little less than a year ago, when the first pictures emerged from Columbine High School, the world stumbled in action and stammered in speech, overwhelmed and appalled that students were capable of such video game-style violence. For months, politicians talked about gun control, priests and rabbis talked about returning to religious morals, talking heads ranted about the decline in American school systems. But as time passed and these shootings became less of a novelty and more of a daily reality, nothing changed. Time only brought an uncomfortable substitute for change, and that is a woeful capitulating silence. Even whiny editorial columnists stopped bringing it up. Most of them, at least. Presumably, when the shooting I read about happened, killing a boy I don't know, in a school I never heard of, with a gun I wouldn't know how to buy if I tried, school was as it always was. Students went to homeroom, laughed about someone still wearing tapered jeans (even though the '80s have been over for a decade), then talked about who was going to ask whom out and whether he was going to do it himself or have a friend do it for him. Lockers were slammed shut, class bells rang and students rushed to what they presumed would be a normal class period. And in fact, maybe they got what they expected. Maybe watching a classmate being shot by another classmate isn't that bizarre anymore that it deserves to be called abnormal. Blood in the hallway is on its way to becoming as commonplace as graffiti in the bathroom. Instead of caring more about the increasing prevalence of school violence, I've found myself trying to care less, ignoring it in the same way I ignore a zit -- knowing that it's there, hoping that it goes away. And minus the first couple of shootings, which were appalling and startling in their newness, the U.S. has taken this stance as well; we hope that that violence in schools will clear up like bad acne. If we leave it alone, it will go away. If only bad acne were still the biggest problem in middle school. Violence in schools has become so frequent recently that the sickening horror that once traveled hand in hand with it has disappeared as quickly and silently as slap bracelets in the early '90s. We've seen so many articles in the paper about children dying on playgrounds, about angry workers shooting their co-workers, that the nausea and sinking feelings that once filled us have been dulled. Whether it is the profoundly simple and unsettlingly happy photographs of teenage murderers in their childhood poses smiling pleasantly at us from the cover of Time or Newsweek, or an article shoved somewhere in the back of the newspaper, violence in schools has become as trite as "Dear Abby." And this very triteness has caused us to shrug our shoulders in defeat, to turn our heads in the other direction, to give up because trying and talking has done nothing. But it's time for that to change. It is time for the triteness to end, the horror to resurface and the incidents to regain their abnormality. It is time for the novelty of the events to reappear, because if it doesn't, seeing blood on the playground will only become an expected part of growing up, as much a rite of passage as buying your first pair of high heels or your first kiss. The sooner our expectation of schoolyard horror ends, the sooner our apathy toward these events ceases, the sooner people will remember that these shootings are not a fad that will pass, but a problem that grows daily. How can we force ourselves to care about events that seem so remote to us and irreparable? Next time you see a headline like "Boy Killed in School Shooting," read it as the name of a family member or a close friend. We need to make these events closer to us, in order to remember our sense of compassion. Act as though each shooting is not simply an abstraction, but your own personal tragedy. Because truly, becoming numb to violence is a tragedy of which we all are victims. It is our tragedy.