Observations of a Country Searching for Answers

Being in the USA when the terrible massacre of school students occured at Littleton, Colorado, triggered memories of what most of us felt when so many were murdered on that weekend at Port Arthur. For two weeks after the tragedy at Columbine High School, newspapers, TV Current Affairs and talk- back radio was filled with people looking for an answer. As someone once said... To adequately deal with trauma, we must first complete and explain the event before we can categorise and resolve it.

Blame, recrimination and guilt seemed to cover all aspects of reporting by the media. The NRA (National Rifle Association), the failure of school systems, moral decay of society, lack of support for troubled students and the breakdown of the family, all seemed to be lumped together in an effort to explain how such an event could occur.

New York Post writer, Bob McManus highlighted the level to which the search for an answer could go by blaming the event on pure evil. McManus wrote... " Consider President Clinton's bizarre dispatch of federal, secular, grief counselors to the scene - as if there could have been a meaningful role for secularity in what was clearly and fundamentally a crisis of the soul. At the end of the day, Littleton is about evil and insanity and the inability of people to distinguish freedom from license."

One of the major problems with this school shooting, as it is with many other traumatic events, is our inability to find reasons which help us to explain the seemingly inexplicible.