Looking at two sides of violence: the massacre at Columbine High School creates pause for thought about the bombing strategy in Kosovo. How can we dissuade children from violence if we lightly make war?

Insight on the News, May 17, 1999 by Jamie Dettmer

What turned them into cold-blooded murderers? Why did two adolescent boys in ski masks turn guns on their classmates and execute one of the most shocking shooting incidents this country has ever seen? The carnage at Columbine High School and the traumatic consequences of youth violence swept even the Balkan tragedy from the airwaves. As NATO bombs continued to drop on Belgrade and the war threatened to spill across the borders into countries neighboring Serbia, a stunned America and its shocked lawmakers turned away from the bestial faraway violence to mourn the deaths of 15 Colorado youngsters and try to make sense of the sickening domestic tragedy.

To answer the drumbeat of why, politicians as well as psychologists rushed to the TV broadcast studios to proffer ready-made explanations for the mind-numbing slaughter of the innocents April 20 in the Denver suburb of Littleton. A breakdown in family values and the loss of faith, some conservatives asserted, including GOP presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who quickly announced, "America got a glimpse of the last stop on that train to hell she boarded decades ago when we declared that God is dead."

Liberals, of course, blamed America's gun culture and the ease with which kids can get their hands on firearms, even when parents remain vigilant. The Libertarian Party blamed government schools and called for homeschooling. Dan Quayle pointed an accusatory finger at the permissive culture and the low state of the American family. The president offered condolences, asked America to unite in prayers for the dead and for their grieving parents, called for yet another in his series of nationwide assessments to identify the roots of school violence and urged another round of crisis management and counseling.

Clinton's message was clear: America needs to redouble its efforts to avoid violence and to find constructive ways to ease troubled minds. "We also have to take this moment, once again, to hammer home to all the children of America that violence is wrong," he said. "Parents should take this moment to ask what else they can do to shield our children from violent images and experiences that warp young perceptions and obscure the consequences of violence, to show our children, by the power of our own example, how to resolve conflicts peacefully."

The remark struck one Balkans-absorbed lawmaker as inadvertently ironic. And the surprise is, he seemed to be the only one in town who saw it. "It could be a stretch but sometimes, you know, awful coincidences happen that make you stop and think and say, `If that's the lesson we should draw from that incident, shouldn't we apply it to some of our other problems?'" The lawmaker, a House Democrat, was hesitant to put his name to a comparison between Littleton and Kosovo, but he added: "We all agree that television is a pervasive influence on kids, and what do they see now? The Balkans, us dropping bombs and calling it humane. And they see Pentagon briefers showing videos of missiles hitting buildings nice and neat. Talk about obscuring the consequences of violence."

A still small voice of reason? One or two psychologists interviewed on National Public Radio pointed to the irony of talking about "peaceful resolution of conflict" while bombs are falling. And commentator Mara Liasson noted how different the president was in his manner and tone when talking about Littleton as compared to Kosovo. "One thing that I noticed yesterday when he came to the briefing room at about 7:30 last night to talk about Littleton, he lingered for a long time, answering question after question. Now he certainly hasn't done that on Kosovo." A disconnect between domestic horror and foreign catastrophe? If so the president wasn't alone in suffering it -- the press and the pundits made no connections either, despite that Clinton remark about leading children by example.

In the hours and days following the Littleton slaughter great efforts were made by politicians and media alike to enter the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the youths who carried out the chilling Columbine murders. It quickly was remarked that both of them spent adolescence deep inside the morbid teenage subculture of Gothic fantasy, set themselves apart as outcasts and, hardly surprising, became constant targets of derision by their peers. A spiraling effect seems to have developed without early-warning alarms at the school. The authorities hadn't earmarked the pair for constructive counseling nor had parents been called on to try to calm their chaotic imaginations. No intervention occurred that might have averted tragedy.

By contrast, in all the words that have been expended on Kosovo since the NATO strike on Yugoslavia, there has been an all but complete failure by commentators and politicians alike to go beyond the polemical talk of the cold-hearted evil of Slobodan Milosevic and to understand why he is behaving the way he is, brutally driving Albanians from Kosovo. Nor have the collective fanaticism or dark fantasies of the Serbs been grappled with psychologically or intellectually -- in fact, the administration just tries to ignore Serbian support for Milosevic and to kid itself that Serbs are unwilling accessories after the fact as opposed to accomplices in the confrontation between their government and NATO.