When Will We Ever Learn?

April 23, 1999

When MacDuff is told by Ross that MacDuff’s wife and children have been murdered, MacDuff cries:

“Did Heaven look on,
And would not take their part?”
(MacBeth, Act IV, Sc. 3)

An agonized cry like that must have been expressed by parents and friends of the victims of the murderers in Columbine High School.

The nation is stunned and reeling because of the horrifying tragedy in Littleton, Colorado. The dead and wounded portrayed in grieving interviews and by graphic camera work, provoke almost all of us to ask, "Why?" HOW?"

Why did the two high school juniors commit these murders as prelude to killing themselves?

How were these seventeen-year-old young men able to acquire the weapons and assemble bombs of various kinds with no one, particularly their parents, knowing, or worse still, noticing their activity and doing nothing about it? Are there others involved?

By the time you read this, there will have been many proposed answers and multiples of theories, none of which will wholly explain the terrible event.

Will we learn? What must we do?

Some grieving parents find some solace in believing that this tragedy is somehow all part of a plan of God. I cannot share that faith or comfort. In my view, “What kind of God would that be?” Neither can I see any Divine purpose, nor do I have any assurance, that good always emerges from evil events. But I do believe there can be consequences.

“Unmerited suffering is redemptive.” That is a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe Gandhi's non-violent philosophy of change is behind that, if not his actual words.

“Redemptive” in this context is not salvation for one's individual soul. Rather it is the lessening of evil in the life of society; progress in laws or attitudes that protect minorities from acts and crimes committed by organized bigots; an increased appreciation of all human beings. James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, Medgar Evers, Martin King are examples in in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. They did not seek suffering. They did not deserve to to be murdered; yet they were. Their deaths dramatized the issues and called millions of others to the cause.

An historical incident recorded by Edward Gibbon illustrates this sad but true aspect of the human condition.

At the beginning of the 5th century A.D., Honorius was Emperor of the Roman Empire. Up to that time, the savage games of gladiators were the highlight and entertainment of the Roman citizens. Gibbon believed that as many as several thousand gladiators were savagely slain every year in the arenas.

There were protesters. Pollentia, a Christian poet, pleaded with the Emperor to end this bloody custom. Prudentius, a Christian preacher found no response to his exhortations.

But Telemachus, a monk from Asia, descended into the Arena to physically separate the fighting gladiators. The people in the stands, angry that their entertainment was being interrupted, overwhelmed Telemachus and stoned him to death.

The excited mob apparently sobered at his cruel death at their hands. When Emperor Honorius then then abolished the bloody, deadly games forever, there was no substantial protest by the people.

Telemachus did not deserve to die. But it was his martyrdom that ended the gladiatorial games – not the poetry of Pollentia; not the preaching of Prudentius. (DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, Vol. II, Ch. xxx, p. 138-9)

“Unmerited Suffering is Redemptive.”

Can there be a positive consequence to the awful carnage at Columbine High School?

Is it possible that there will be motivation and momentum to make it much more difficult to to obtain handguns, rapid-firing rifles, sawed-off shotguns? The National Rifle Association opposes any limitations and their big-dollar lobby has been effective.

Bob Herbert, in his column in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, April 22, writes: “In 1996, handguns were used to murder 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany, and 9,390 in the United States.”

Must we remain a violent Nation?

The tragedy of Columbine High School cannot be erased or forgotten. But if one consequence of that terrible day is a keener national consciousness of the need to restrict the possession and use of firearms, then perhaps we will begin to learn other lessons, too – the "Why?" of the senseless violence of high school students on a killing spree.