After particularly horrifying events, we Americans seem to have a compulsion to do something to stop them from ever happening again -- now! Now, that's a natural enough reaction, but unfortunately we never give them time to sink in before we rush off to fix them and then, satisfied that we've done "something," promptly forget about them.
Take this recent example of zero-tolerance from a school near Chicago (via Best Of The Web.)
High school senior Allen Lee sat down with his creative writing class on
Monday and penned an essay that so disturbed his teacher, school administrators
and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct.
Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested
Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police
described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person
or location.
The youth's father said his son was not suspended or expelled but was forced
to attend classes elsewhere for now. . . .
Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio said the charge was appropriate even though
the essay was not published or posted for public viewing.
Disorderly conduct, which carries a penalty of 30 days in jail and a $1,500
fine, is filed for pranks such as pulling a fire alarm or dialing 911. But
it can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual, Delelio
said.
The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content," he said.
After the Long Island Railroad shootings in 1993 and later following the Columbine killings, the nation was gripped in gun-control mania. If we only had stronger laws against ownership of firearms, terrible incidents like these wouldn't happen. Well, we significantly strengthened the laws -- but the killings go on.
So, I was quite pleased that after the Virginia Tech murders, the calls for further gun control were muted. Maybe we've learned something, I thought. But now I'm reading more and more incidents like this where teachers are suddenly on the lookout for writing of the type created by Cho Seung-Hui and are fearful that another killer lurks amongst us.
This latest paranoia, too, will eventually pass, but in the meantime young people with completely innocent motives will suffer as this young man did.
[UPDATE:] Agoraphilia puts the VT shootings into perspective -- something that might have been expected of the above teacher and police chief.
[UPDATE, UPDATE:] Christopher Hitchens rues the mawkishness that marked so much of the reaction.
It was my friend Adolph Reed who first pointed out this tendency to
what he called "vicarious identification." At the time of the murder of
Lisa Steinberg
in New York in 1987, he was struck by the tendency of crowds to show up
for funerals of people they didn't know, often throwing teddy bears
over the railings and in other ways showing that (as well as needing to
get a life) they in some bizarre way seemed to need to get a death. The
hysteria that followed a traffic accident in Paris involving a disco princess—surely
the most hyped non-event of all time—seemed to suggest an even wider
surrender to the overwhelming need to emote: The less at stake, the
greater the grieving.