Anywhere, Anyhow, Any Time
We should stop acting so surprised every time a student gets violent inside a suburban school.
On April 20, 1999, a visibly shaken President Clinton told the nation he was “shocked and saddened” by the student rampage at Columbine High School that day that had left 15 dead. He talked about how he had once visited Littleton, Colorado, and said if such a tragedy could happen there, it could happen anywhere. Later, a Columbine teacher echoed Clinton: “This kind of thing is always in the back of your mind, but you never think it can happen. I guess it can happen anywhere.”
Four years later, after a student at Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota, shot and killed two classmates, a parent there said: “We moved up here two years ago from Arizona to get away from all of this. We wanted to raise the boys in a nice community. This just shows that it can happen anywhere.”
And the phrase got recycled yet again last month by a parent whose children attend Lincoln-Sudbury High, where John Odgren stands accused of fatally stabbing a classmate, James Alenson: “The fact that it happened in Sudbury, Massachusetts, means that it can happen anywhere.” Not only can it happen anywhere – even in the land of BMWs and McMansions – it has been happening anywhere for quite a while now. Which is why it’s time politicians, teachers, parents, and anybody else who has uttered this inane phrase after a senseless tragedy should find another way to express their grief. Not only is it arrogant, it’s insulting to a large group of people – namely those who live in cities and send their kids to urban schools.
Read between the not-so-subtle lines of “It can happen anywhere.” What they are saying is, “I guess the poor city schools with the black kids aren’t the only places where violence can happen.” I know the parents who say these things. I met their like 10 years ago while covering a story about two white, affluent New Jersey teenagers who hid the girl’s pregnancy and killed their newborn because they were terrified about their parents finding out. The reaction then was the same: Other kids do this, not ours. Parents refused to imagine their teens having unsafe sex and hiding a pregnancy, arrogantly assuming only poor urban kids could be so dumb.
If, however, you look at the worst of the school shootings over the last decade, they were typically not in urban districts like New York, Chicago, Detroit, or Boston. They were mostly in places like West Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; Santee, California; and Red Lake, Minnesota. This is not to say urban schools don’t have their problems. Boston Public School officials are confiscating weapons in record numbers – 577 (mostly knives) in the 2005-2006 school year, compared with 407 five years ago. And a recent study found that eight out of every thousand youths in Boston were shooting victims last year. Nearly half of Boston public high schools today have metal detectors, including Charlestown, which installed them last fall after a shooting outside and two arrests.
But more frightening than these facts is that naive suburban parents cling to their idyllic belief that the urban minority teenager remains the biggest threat to society. Maybe the mug shots of the offenders from Columbine, Paducah, and Sudbury will scare these parents straight, because the real threat is any teenager, living anywhere, and of any color or class who’s been taunted and shunned at school or who’s grown estranged at home while bonding with 400 friends on MySpace and texting from under the covers at night.
“I think a lot of kids feel very alienated and isolated, the boys especially,” says Dr. Eileen Costello, a Jamaica Plain pediatrician who in 2003 co-authored, with Dr. Perri Klass, Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn’t Fit In – When to Worry and When Not to Worry. “They spend so much time doing video games. I’m trying to talk to them or do a throat culture while they’re trying to kill someone on Game Boy.”
The issue in Sudbury is not whether John Odgren, who was being treated for Asperger’s disorder, a form of autism, should have been mainstreamed. The issue is how so many people – his parents, classmates, and teachers, for starters – either missed or ignored signals of his unhappiness, his loneliness, or, most disturbing, his obsession with weapons. And how many more suburban kids like him are out there, time bombs clicking away on their Game Boys while no one pays them any attention.
Doug Most is the editor of the Globe Magazine. E-mail him at dmost@globe.com. 