The recent rash of teenage shootings has me thinking again about the wisdom of the miner’s canary analogy Lani Guinier has been pushing.
Canaries, with their more fragile respiratory systems, were once used by coal miners to warn of increasing levels of toxicity in the air. Guinier says racial minorities are America’s canaries; their crime, their violence and their social dysfunction warn us of toxins in the social atmosphere.
So, perhaps, do individual youngsters such as the 15-year-old Springfield, Ore., boy accused in the shooting spree that left two classmates dead and two dozen injured. Springfield thus joins the list of place names–Pearl, Jonesboro, Edinboro, Fayetteville–that seem to be trying to warn us of something poisonous in the air.
The question is: What are we to do about what these teenage canaries are telling us?
Maybe the first thing we ought to do is remind ourselves that American violence isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Lynchings certainly were acts of violence–and not just the snapping of one overwrought mind, either. The labor violence of the old days, the gangster wars all should remind us that violence is as American as apple pie.
And maybe the second thing we ought to do is remind ourselves that there are dangers we can’t really avoid. Earthquakes and tornadoes usually come unannounced. Hurricanes often give us a bit more notice.
Having said all that, I do believe that the recent rash of school violence is more than unpredictable coincidence, like a particularly rough year for hurricanes. I think these disturbed and disturbing youngsters really are serving as canaries.
The problem, though, is that we keep trying to use their warnings to figure out which particular children are likely to go berserk. When the experts get done profiling individual suspects–and piecing together the statements and observations of their families and classmates–we want to say: If you knew all that, why didn’t somebody intervene to stop it?
But suppose instead of trying to predict which fragile canary would be the next to succumb, we paid a bit more attention to the general level of atmospheric toxicity.
What I’m saying is that our canaries have told us enough for us to know that we need to reduce not just the availability of guns but our quick recourse to confrontation in every social or political disagreement. We need (as Deborah Tannen reminds us in her new book, “The Argument Culture”) to find less bellicose ways to describe our public actions. Enough “drug wars,” “cultural battles” and “political warfare” financed by “warchests.”
Politicians whose politesse used to increase in direct proportion as their philosophical outrage now give full vent to the outrage. Social activists don’t just disagree with their opposition; they speak and behave as though their opponents are the personification of evil: racist, sexist, market-worshipping pigs or irresponsible psychobabbling idiots whose sole aim in life is to throw money at imaginary problems. They’d have us believe our world is divided between non-chalant baby-killers and bedroom-invading fetus worshipers.
Am I suggesting that ordinary incivility is partly to blame for the deaths of school children? In a word, yes. I’m saying that adult irascibility–from political intemperance to road rage–can poison our social and civic atmosphere as surely as methane poisons coal mines. We keep looking for ideologically convenient targets to blame for what’s gone wrong–the gun lobby, for instance.
I’m appalled by the prevalence of guns, by the easy access to guns, by the quick recourse with guns. I think the National Rifle Association is out of its collective mind.
But I think a good part of the blame for what is happening to our young people lies much closer to home. We behave in our civic and political lives as though anything goes, so long as it fits our side of the issues. And we are endlessly surprised when our children show themselves to be heartless teasers, graceless winners, bitter losers, self-centered jerks–and occasionally killers.
