Read this paragraph:
Two days after a shooting rampage on the Indian reservation here left 10 dead, friends, relatives and neighbors of the teenage assailant began to sketch a portrait of a deeply disturbed youth who had been treated for depression in a psychiatric ward, lost several close family members, sketched gruesome scenes of armed warriors and was removed from the school where he gunned down most of his victims Monday.
Now these paragraphs:
“The clues were all there,” said Kim DesJarlait, Mr. Weise’s stepaunt, who lives in Minneapolis. “Everything was laid out, right there, for the school or the authorities in Red Lake to see it coming. I don’t want to blame Red Lake, but did they not put two and two together? This kid was crying out, and those guys chose to ignore it. They need to start focusing on their kids.”
Others, including the principal of the high school where, on Monday, Mr. Weise killed five students, a security guard, a teacher and then himself, defended their handling of the teenager, saying that the authorities had seen all there was – at the time – to see, and had actually been struggling madly to help a boy through his difficult youth.
“We may need people to be more aware,” the principal of Red Lake High School, Chris Dunshee, acknowledged on Wednesday, after teachers and school board officials met privately for the first time for counseling. “But I think most of us felt like this was a troubled young man, and someone whose problems we felt like we were addressing.”
What do you see?
I read these paragraphs and I see a series of people who, for whatever reason, failed Jeff Wiese and expected someone else to take responsibility for him. Look at his aunt’s statement. Look at how she keeps saying that “they” failed and that “they” needed to pay closer attention. Look at the statement from the principal. Look at how he notes he says that “we felt like we” addressed the problems.
Could these quotes be any more self-centered? Why, after Columbine, did friends and family wait until after this slaughter to begin to put the clues together? Were the clues insufficient? Was the time spent on Nazi web sites hot quite a clear enough clue that something more than benign neglect was warranted? Were the stories and illustrations not quite the warning sign necessary that maybe Weise was something more than a Goth wanna-be? How about his Yahoo! profile photo (warning…it’s a little bit unsettling) or anything else in his Yahoo! profile, for that matter.
What were his friends and family and school teachers waiting for? Who was watching over this young man?
Apparently no one. No one seemed to care quite enough to do whatever was necessary to pull him back from the brink of disaster. They saw the signs, did enough to soothe their consciences and waited for someone else to do something more.
Well, that something more never happened and now a handful of people and one very troubled, but never unredeemable, young man are dead.
This isn’t a unique case. Think all the way back to Columbine and you might remember a community shocked by this violence that didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. You’ll see parents and school officials shaking their heads in remorse and sadness, yet never once fully owning the responsibility for that child gone so very wrong.
Why? I wish I could tell you. Senator Clinton once wrote a book called “It Takes a Village” which was hailed as a wonderful new means of raising kids (and excoriated as commie feel-good claptrap). Well, the title, at least was correct. It does take a vilage to raise a child. No parents can raise a child into a well-adjusted, productive citizen all by themselves. They need family, friends, school, church and all the other support networks that exist in a responsible society.
But it also means that every member of a responsible society has to own that responsibility. It means that we can’t look on the neighbor’s child as “someone else’s problem”. It means that we have to be involved in some meaningful way with out neighbors and friends and family, ready to help when needed.
It doesn’t mean that we ought to charge in, bull-headed and blind, to every family situation, but it means that we have to care, at least a little.
I’ll give a personal example, just to illustrate the point (not to necessarily tout myself as a great human. God knows I’m not, but once in a while I do something right). My neighbors have two little boys, 5 and 3 years old. They’re good kids, and I dig them both. Their Dad (who I also like, by the way. Heck, the whole family..they’re good people!) has been dealing with a pretty serious back injury. He can’t get out and play with his sons and roughhouse a little and do what little boys love to do. His wife does that quite a bit, but you just know that it’s not the same as playing ball with a big guy, you know (I don’t mean any insult, ladies, but it’s just the way of little boys)? Well, anytime the weather’s nice, the boys go out and play and, since we share a duplex, they’re playing right next to me as I get home from work. I always say Hi and see how they are and they always have great stories about the cool things they found that day (bugs or frogs…always bugs or frogs) or some new cool thing they can do. And we play ball for a while. After about an hour or so I’m ready to get inside because I’m not a little boy and I don’t have that wonderful boundless reserve of energy they do. Often their Dad is out there watching us play and we chat a while, too. Sometimes he gets in a kick or two, as much as he can. When it’s time for me to go, the boys are always very nice about letting me go, just as long as I promise to come back and play another day. I always do.
What’s the point of the story? The point is that there are a lot of other things I could do rather than play ball with them but nothing else I have seems quite as important as investing a little time in their childhood. Maybe some time later in their life they’ll remember those spring evenings fondly and that’ll be a very good thing.
I’m sure that everyone involved with Jeff Weise felt like they were doing something good for him. The evidence is that they all thought they were helping. But no one seemed try to get close enough to him to recognize that there were real problems. I don’t know that Jeff Weise had anyone kicking the ball around with him when he was a kid or just sitting down and listening to him when he wanted to talk or taking him out to a ballgame or dinner or anything that would have shown him that someone really did care about his welfare.
Well, that’s not true. His online community of Nazi hate-mongers showd him that, and that’s why he fell in with them so completely and willingly. It ought to shame his family, friends, and school that only racist fools showed enough interest in him to welcome him into their community.
Shame on them. Shame on all of them.
