So I was reading an article today about a White House sponsored "summit" on preventing school violence (defeating in White House speak.) Obviously its a topic on a lot of peoples minds considering the three horrible events in schools in the past weeks. It goes with out saying, attention to the matter is necessary and that there is a wide range of root causes and wide range of possible solutions. I certainly don't find fault with the attempt to do something, or at least discuss some of the issues.
What I find borderline disgusting is the fact that violence in schools seems to be portrayed as an isolated, insulated from the rest of the world, event. Something that occurs in a vacum, something that can be contained by better inteligence, something that if only we find out a day before the shooting starts and prevent it then all is ok and all is safe, a few bad apples to be plucked from the tree will do the trick. No no no no no way could violence in schools somehow reflect the adult world, the outside would. This is what I find disgusting, Bush lamenting the violence, ( really I do think it makes him sad, the same way that seeing a kitten dead in the street still makes me sad no matter how many stories of thousands of people dying around the world pass over me with barely a bat of the eye) with out realising that his course of action that he has chosen to take sets one of the worst examples of using violence and threats of violence before anything.
No, of course its not purely his or the governments fault, but its hard to take seriously a call to cease violence in schools from him, when so many calls to curtail violence around the globe are laughed off as fringe politics by his spokes people. There for sure are 'bad apples' that come into this world fully formed and unpreventable, but there are many many more that learn from daily doses of seeing adults (or others who should be in control) not be able to solve their issues in a humane manner. The most obvious choice, and easy, in such a world is to resort to overwhelming force that proves your point so painfully clear that the wholeworld can' help but take notice.
I do hope the discussions that the white house is sponsoring produce some good results, anything is better than nothing. But I am perpetually stunned by the blindness that some people exhibit to the results of their own actions and the inability to reconcile the spill over from one realm to another.