I hate to say it, but the recent school shooting in Germany that left 17 people dead didn't even give me pause when I heard about it for the first time.
I'm so over the drama of it all, having lived through so many mass tragedies in the years since the Columbine highschoolers in Colorado made school shootings fashionable as a means of protesting the crappy hand you'd been dealt.
Every time -- Columbine, Paducah, Pearl, Jonesboro and on and on -- parents, educators and politicians stood around wringing their hands while vowing to tighten gun laws and beef up on-campus security measures.
And every time these ideas sounded like good ones until the bodies were buried, the media had moved on to other news, and the families of the slain were left to live forever in their own private hells.
Then nothing changed. Nothing. Violent video games, the much-beloved entertainment choice of so many mass killers, are still marketed to the very kids who ought not to have them -- adolescent and teen boys more full of testosterone and pent-up aggression than common sense and self-control.
A violent shoot-em-up game figures into the German kid's story as it did in those of the Columbine shooters.
Bullying is still a huge issue in schools. I can't count how many online videos have been posted and yanked in the past couple of years in which preteens or teens are seen beating the crap out of each other as their friends stand around and cheer. Just this week, Texas newspapers are leading with a story out of Corpus Christi in which mentally disabled men at a state school there were cajoled into fighting one another for the entertainment of school employees. Needless to say, those men, many of whom are severely mentally retarded, had no clue their inhumane acts towards one another were just that.
Bullying and the inability to "fit in" figure in the German shooter's story, too. Of course that was cited as the major contributing factor in the Columbine killings - two misfits who got tired of being treated like nobodies.
Finally, parental involvement -- or lack thereof -- is a societal ill that just doesn't seem to get any better with time. If it did, the first two things I listed would be all but non-existent since strong parenting usually knocks out tendencies towards bad behavior and dictates the choices of minors as far as what they watch or listen to.
The articles on the German shooter don't say much yet about his family other than that his father is a successful businessman who runs a small company. But in the days and weeks ahead I'll be curious to know how much time his family spent together, how well his parents knew his habits and interests.
Homeschooling is illegal in Germany -- all children must go to government schools and those parents who attempt homeschooling are heavily penalized.
I bring this up because of something an editorial in the German daily paper Bild points out:
""The best laws in the world are useless, if parents do not know what is going on in their children's heads, what they are thinking and dreaming and what are their fears."
I hope the irony is clear.
Government education separates us from our children and it leaves them wide open to influences of which we are often unaware given the secretive tendencies of some kids.
Those of us who homeschool may not be the best parents, the most well-off or the most in touch with the outside world, but two things we do know well are the minds and hearts of our children. We are with them all day every day, talking, exploring, discussing, arguing, observing, loving, and correcting. Parents of government-schooled kids can approximate this way of life, to be sure, but I think they have to make a greater effort. It's hard to get a child to tell you about everything that goes on in that 7.5 hour period they're away from you.
Bild is right -- all the hand wringing and legislation in the world can't stop the horrors of school shootings. That responsibility rests solely with parents, but the parents have to be awake and alert and willing to shoulder it at all times. In short, parenting their children to adulthood must always be Job #1.
Sadly, this doesn't hold true for far too many families and society as a whole gets to pay the price.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding be poured out upon the people of Germany.
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