By GREG NIKKEL, of the Weyburn Review
In the aftermath of the high school shooting-bombing incident in Littleton, Colo., television journalists on a variety of networks instantly began posing questions like "Why did this happen?", "Who should be blamed?" and "Can it happen here?"
After I first wrote this column, I was driving home and heard on the radio someone talking to a student from Taber, Alta., describing something like what happened in Colorado, and the answer to the latter question was obvious - it can happen here, and now it has.
Perhaps the questions were posed amidst the flurry of news clips, emerging from the small town located south of Denver or from the small town east of Lethbridge, in an effort to seem relevant and profound; unfortunately these "probing reports" with talking heads of experts aren't always very helpful in these kinds of situations.
Such events almost boggles the mind with their scope and horror, as ordinary people grapple with the concept of high school students driven to such anger and hatred that they would plan for over a year to blow up a high school that houses 1,800 students, with the intention to kill at least 500 in the process, and then move on to commit other acts of destruction before they were done. That was the plan in Colorado at least; in Taber, it seems the act was a copycat reaction rather than a well-thought-out plot.
In light of what these members of the so-called "Trench Coat Mafia" really wanted to do, it doesn't seem that they got very far. In reality, however, these two in Littleton (with the help of who knows how many) should never have reached the point they did.
There are no easy answers for what happened, that much is clear; parents, teachers, fellow students and police all had tips and hints along the way that some things were not right in these teens' lives, but what it came down to is, nobody believed they would actually do it.
People are pointing fingers at everything from violent video games and movies to the availability of guns (which is certainly true in Colorado) to the influences of others shared via the Internet, and in the case of Alberta, coverage by the media of the Colorado incident (which is a non-reason, just an excuse to blame the media). Some of these most certainly had an influence, but really all are just symptoms of the main root cause.
Even those decrying what a violent society we have become are only just railing at a symptom; the violence is there to be sure, and is manifest in the music, movies and video games these teens voraciously ate up. The weaponry that people can buy in Colorado is astounding, with military-type hardware you would be instantly arrested for here in Canada if you brought them north of the 49th Parallel, so it's not that big a stretch of the imagination that these youths ended up with them. Not many details of what happened in Taber were known at the time of this writing, so I can't say how that youth acquired his weapon, reported to be a .22 calibre rifle.
The root, the germ or seed of all this grief and devastation began growing at home, and all of the above factors merely exacerbated what was already happening in the hearts of the youths. Really only the parents of these youth may know for sure, but something went awry somewhere along the way: time wasn't spent with them, love wasn't evident, forgiveness wasn't shown, encouragement was missing, a solid foundation of moral values not laid - I would wager that a combination of some or all of these things formed the first sprouts of hate, resentment, anger and low self-esteem.
You add in the unfettered influences listed above, mix the teens together with others who have the same smoldering feelings of hate, and a thirst for revenge will begin to grow until it turns a person hard and bitter, or helps push them over the edge.
I'm not saying this because I think I'm a better parent than anyone else; I say this as a father and concerned citizen, because we can't take for granted that such a horrific situation can only happen somewhere else.
One observation I heard, possibly on a CNN program, hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned: our nation (both the U.S. and Canada) needs to wake up, and parents need to make sure they are on the bit from the very beginning, filling the lives of their children with care, firm discipline, love, forgiveness and guidance by investing the kind of time with them that they need, and by being there for them no matter what comes along in their lives.
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