Power of Humiliation --
School Shootings May Bespeak Not Godlessness But Misguided Godliness

Among the responses to the rash of shootings in high schools have been calls for a return to a more God-centered education. But that may be a most unfortunate choice under the circumstances, according to PNS Associate Editor Joe Loya. Loya is a California writer currently writing a memoir.

The President's "summit" on youth violence last week gave credibility to the axiom that it's useless for sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while wolves remain of a different opinion. On the day he was to deliver a speech in Littleton, six students in Conyers, Ga., were wounded during another school shooting.

Celebrity talk or congressional legislation cannot explain how hot humiliations accrue dark, silent powers in the shadows of an aggrieved student's imagination and turn the soul into a desperate thing.

In his speech at Littleton after last month's carnage, Vice-president Gore asked, "What say we into the open muzzle of this tragedy, cocked and aimed at our hearts?"

Gary L. Bauer, a religious conservative running for President, stared into that open muzzle and said godlessness has pervaded our culture for the past three decades, so we should post the Ten Commandments in schools again.

Presidential hopeful Dan Quayle looked into that open muzzle and declared cocked guns aren't the problem. "A child who loves God, honors his parents and respects his neighbors will not kill anyone," he assures us. I wonder what book he's been reading.

I was raised in a religious home. My father was a preacher with a penchant for thumping his Bible and punching his kids. When I was 16, I stabbed him in the neck in response to a beating in which he broke several of my bones.

We could blame Hollywood or lax cultural mores for me raising my rebellious arm to my father, but in fact it was Bible stories that first taught me that shedding blood was required for personal salvation. It was Christian theology that introduced me to the notion that the Kingdom arrives only after apocalypse.

I can see how some unhappy adolescents respond to being humiliated as if it threatens their whole being. Inwardly menaced by the idea -- real or imagined -- that their very existence may be extinguished, those kids fight to preserve their egos. That's how I began to imagine an apocalyptic script where I was one of the four avenging Horsemen.

Fortunately my father survived the stabbing. But our conflict would forever personify the W.H. Auden stanza,

"I and the public know
what all schoolchildren learn.
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return."

In the Old Testament, God communicated to King Saul that he wanted to make the Amalekites pay for treating Israel badly when they were leaving Egypt. "Now go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them: Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."

Payback was as good a motive as any for men in the Bible to commence a good day of shedding innocent blood. Dan Quayle should be reminded that in the Bible people who "loved God and honored their parents" did not hesitate to slaughter infants. And they didn't need guns, nintendo, Marilyn Manson videos, or films glamorizing violence to dement their imaginations.

I know the sweet catharsis affiliated with angry vengeance. Like the Israelites in the Old Testament who finally lifted the sword against their oppressor, my violent action against my father was a blessed feeling.

Retribution was one reason I became a robber. In my twisted imagination, I had come to blame society and its authority for the abuse I endured as a kid. So I picked people at random turning my passive experience of being a victim into an active experience of the perpetrator.

The bloody lesson on the national blackboard is that you can put V-chips in televisions -- or in every student's head if you want -- but revenge is an ancient impulse unaffected by rational measures. Oust all the Hollywood storytellers and you still must abide the historians or Bible storytellers with their tales of massacres and revenge.

Minds in the service of slogans see godlessness when they look at the long-haired teenager in a trenchcoat with a mask on his face and an automatic in his hand. I see boys fashioning themselves in the image of the God who said, "Vengeance is mine." So I ask you: should we blame the translation for the quality of the original?

back to writing