Title: Colorado's carnage is inevitable in our culture of violence

Source: www.bostonglobe.com, 04/22/99, and printed in the Boston Globe, same date.

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Colorado's carnage is inevitable in our culture of violence

By John Ellis

Boston Globe 4/22 1999

We have surrounded ourselves with violence. It is everywhere we turn.
It is in our music. It is on our televisions. It is in our movies. It
is on our video games. It is prominently featured in print media and
on popular Web sites. If it bleeds it leads, and it leads because it
sells.

Tuesday's massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., was
not an aberration. It was and is a fact of modern American life.
Yesterday, the Associated Press published a list of school shootings
from the 1997-98 academic year. Add Littleton to this reading of the
roll:

In October 1997, a 16-year-old boy in Pearl, Miss., killed his mother,
then went on to his high school and shot nine students.

In November of that same year, three students were murdered and five
more were wounded at Heath High School in Paducah, Ky. The shooter was
a 14-year-old boy.

In March 1998, four girls and a teacher were killed and 10 others
wounded during a false fire alarm at a middle school in Jonesboro,
Ark. Two boys, ages 11 and 13, lurking in the nearby woods, opened
fire as students and teachers emerged into the kill zone.

In May, two teenagers were killed and more than 20 people were injured
when a 15-year-old boy opened fire at a high school in Springfield,
Ore.

This shooting spree overshadowed the murder of an 18-year-old high
school student, two days earlier, in Fayetville, Tenn. A classmate
killed him in the school's parking lot, just like that.

What happened in Littleton this week and across the country last year
will happen again, somewhere in America, and soon. How can it not?

Ours is a culture that glorifies violence, profits from it, sells it
with the most advanced technology known to mankind. Violence bounces
off satellites in outer space and beams into every American home,
every hour of every day, every month of every year.

A group called TV-Free America recently published a set of statistics
that describe what is really happening in our homes. The data do not
lie. Consider:

Every week, the average American child between the ages of 2 and 11
watches 1,197 minutes of TV and spends 39 minute talking with his or
her parents. Fifty-two percent of kids between 5 and 17 years old have
a TV in their bedroom. Every year, the average teenager spends 900
hours in school and 1,500 hours watching television.

In any given period during prime time viewing hours, at least 50
people are killed, shot, maimed, or raped across the spectrum of
broadcast and cable television channels. Eighty percent of television
producers believe there's a link between television violence and
real-life violence. Fifty-four percent of local television newscasts
are devoted to stories about crimes, disasters, and wars.

And that's just television. These data do not include the time kids
spend listening to "gangsta" rap and heavy metal, playing Dungeons and
Dragons, watching violent movies (on video and in theaters), and
perusing the Internet for Web sites that show how to build a bomb.

American society is sitting on that bomb, waiting for it to explode,
making money on it in the interim. The television networks, the major
movie studios, record companies, video game software producers, print
and other media are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every
year to adapt children to this diet of violence and carnage. Once
addicted, they'll want more of it, which can and will be provided at a
slightly higher price.

The success of this can be seen in the stock pages. Time Warner, CBS,
GE, Fox, Sony, Disney, Interscope, and many other great and
not-so-great corporations have all seen their shares skyrocket in
value. Investors who have profited from this bonanza may include
residents of Littleton.

In the 1980s, evangelical groups tried to lead boycotts against
entertainment and media companies that produced and broadcast
gratuitously violent fare. Their efforts met with some success at the
grass roots and nothing but scorn from media elites.

In 1996, Bob Dole sought to make cultural and media violence a major
theme of his presidential campaign. He was reviled for his efforts.
Hollywood's contempt for public concern about the ceaseless stream of
violent media was perfectly captured in a quote from Ted Field, the
Marshall Field department store heir and co-founder of Interscope.
"You can tell the people who want to stop us from releasing
controversial rap music one thing," said Field: "Kiss my ass."

Either we change it or we don't. If we don't, then don't be surprised
when the next Littleton happens. And the one after that. And the one
after that. Littleton is just a piece. The larger whole is a society
collapsing under the weight of its own recklessness and
irresponsibility.