I wonder what would happen if America rented a football stadium and stacked up two piles of bodies: in one pile, the bodies of minority inner-city students shot to death last year, and in the other pile, the bodies of white suburban students shot to death last year. Forget about per capita adjustments, forget about the debilitating influence of drugs and poverty, forget about whether the shootings were gang-related—just sort the corpses by color, stack 'em up, and get a NATO "observer" to do a tally. Now I’m as cynical as the next member of Generation Whatever, but I’ll bet you a taped episode of Felicity that the minorities would win hands down, feet up.

In fact, inner city violence has become such an accepted fact of life that, much like nudity and sex, it lacks the punch that makes headlines. Ever since N.W.A., Ice T, and Death Row Records made mackin’, gattin’ and ho-slappin’ a commodity (a la the Celtic bad boys of Riverdance), America has lost its capacity for shock over murder in the American ghetto. The media instead take any opportunity to put human-interest pieces on the front page, showing how inner-city communities are “taking back the streets” or marching to “stop the violence”, even as the slaughter of inner city youth remains buried deep in the “local” section.

Given the media's "bad news isn't news"attitude toward inner-city violence, there should be no question why the Columbine shooting received such supersaturated coverage: the murder of white kids living in (supposedly) wholesome, God-fearing communities still evokes feeling—and, hence, ratings and readership. It’s become too easy to dismiss inner-city shootings as an everyday thing. On a more subconscious level, suburban Americans comfort themselves with the delusion that drug abuse (crack), single motherhood (premarital sex), and senseless violence (gangs) are the exclusive domain of urban (non-white) schools. There are no cries of “Why in our community?” when yet another black or latino youth is carted away under a bloody sheet: we shake our heads sadly, but things like that happen in the ghetto. We expect them to happen, we need them to happen—how else can we demonstrate the relative safety and innocence of the suburbs?

The Columbine “massacre” (billed as “Terror in the Rockies” by “balanced and impartial” Fox News) is only the latest stop of the schoolyard shooting gravy train that's been fueling the media’s appetite for ratings. Jonesboro, AR (shooters Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11) and Paducah, KY (shooter Michael Carneal, 14), are two other examples. Obnoxious graphics, awkward close-ups of runny-eyed teens in hysterical embraces, and liturgical statements like “Today, a community comes together in horror and disbelief, and asks the question: ‘Why here?’” pile cliché upon cliché until only another cliché can describe the media's behavior: a feeding frenzy.

Where were the parents and school administrators as the media pimped their children for cheap dramatic sound bites? In a society where more and more teens are tried as adults, is it now acceptable to interview them like adults? The fact that no one tried to stop the camera crews as they descended upon these traumatized children makes you wonder how safe these kids ever were.

Despite the media's assumed role of national pastor, bringing the nation together “in a moment of loss, mourning, and a search for answers,” the detailed coverage of these killings has accomplished nothing either to prevent such tragedies or help us understand them. Instead they've only managed to:

secure rock 'n roll (and its cousin hip-hop) as the cultural scapegoats of our children’s misbehavior;

ensure that abused, neglected, alienated teens around the country know what “creative problem solving” really means;

redouble White America’s commitment to keeping Jesus in their hearts and blacks out of their neighborhoods;

and benefit the media outlets who covered the story with the stingiest amount of tact and the most saccharine.

Don’t be fooled by the question “Why?” Shoot-out after shoot-out, "Why" isn't what they really want to know. They're really asking, “Why isn’t it good enough that we shipped our kids away the city (read: away from minorities)? Why isn’t football, Bible study, and a minivan enough protection?”

The color-negative of the suburban solution seems to fall short. While the suburban family might not suffer from the complete meltdown experienced by their urban counterparts throughout much of the 80’s and 90’s, suburban teens seem to have ample access to the same sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll that their parents trifled with and (for the most part) grew out of. The difference is that, while Mom or Dad might have toked on a reefer in the rec room while grooving on Steely Dan, their children are huffing paint thinner and snorting heroin in the basement while listening to Master P. I grew up in the lily-white suburbs of the 70’s, and can remember my older sister’s sneering face in her senior yearbook picture, crashing hard off a hit of speed, wearing a Pabst Blue Ribbon T-shirt, flipping off the camera. I assure you, she was not alone in her class.

Far from being the safe haven that affluent Boomers hoped they would be, suburban high schools are shark tanks, a form of social Darwinism where children are forced against their will into a tribal system that equates status with survival. I never saw “Jocks”—the presumed targets of the Littleton “gunmen”—as being the standard-bearers of virtue that the media terms them. Jocks made my high-school experience a living hell, a hell that has been experienced in similar detail by many former students I know; and the favoritism and indifference shown by the teachers whose job it was to protect us is echoed by the media’s refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of Columbine's social elite. It’s easy to say that no “alleged harassment” or “perceived taunt” justifies murder; but live one day in the life of a so-called “Goth” and try to deny the murderous fantasies smoldering in your heart.

This is the great lie of “white flight”. Soccer moms and Boomer dads thought that as long as their kids were kept away from the city and its vices (crack, rap, racial intermingling), that they could continue to strive for 1950’s ideals that only might have existed (I don’t know firsthand, and my parents aren’t telling). Suburban parents thought that they could re-invent parenting itself, a New Age of nurturing mixed with New Math where neglect plus alienation divided by lots of money somehow equals happiness, and where home is about location, location, location. But their chickens are gradually coming home to roost, and they’re bringing their .38’s and a few pipe bombs, just in case.

We live in a society obsessed in equal parts with purity and depravity (no surprise, given our puritanical, witch-burning roots). Let’s not kid ourselves: the suburban illusion is a Grotto of the Virgin—sweet, pure, unsullied; and the ghettos are the repository of our subconscious whores—dark, menacing, undeniably attractive. Without fornicators and prostitutes to condemn (and to frequent), how can one define chastity? The "good people" of Littleton, CO thought they knew one from the other. In fact, they thought that they could steal the Virgin from her grotto, whisk her out of the urban Den of Iniquity, free her from the dark (black) menace of sin and wantonness, and forever shun Satan (with his afro, 40-ouncer and gold teeth). The lesson offered to them by the Columbine shooting, the lesson they are still refusing to learn, is that our demons reside inside of us, that they hide themselves by depicting the Devil as some other person, some other town, some other color. Suburban America might claim that the Devil is a dime bag, or a game of Duke Nukem, or “sluts.com” or Mase, but the real demon is the one whispering this in our ears: Danger is something you can run from.

Want escape the suburbs? Move to Canada. Discuss Here

John lives on the east side (note the lower case) of Milwaukee with his computer, some fantastic art, a respectable view, and the pelts of several unfortunate Beanie Babies™.

Copyright © 1999 John Kusch. All Rights Reserved

JOHN KUSCH has been reading, writing and performing in and around Milwaukee, Wisc. for over 12 years. His subject matter ranges from academic and slam poetry to essays, editorials, erotica, and letters to Grandma. He is currently general editor of Bluff Magazine (www.bluffmag.com), an e-zine dedicated to offending delicate sensibilities through the power of poetry, commentary, and high-concept comix. Reach him at kusch@bluffmag.com.