I have, on occasion, been accused of aiming above the heads of readers of this column. I don’t think that’s true. I think most of you are a great deal smarter than you’re given credit. In fact, I think you have demonstrated your intelligence just by turning to page 4 and reading thus far. I give you credit. I think you’re probably intelligent enough to understand things that are written at an adult level. I usually try to deliver that. Not today. Today there is no risk of overshooting anyone’s intelligence. Today I am aiming directly for the knees. We are all concerned about what certainly looks like a recent epidemic of college campus violence. In the past few weeks, someone stabbed someone on Grant Street. Someone else shot up the walls of Summit Hall. There was a big fight on North High Street. Someone else fell and cut himself on North High Street, for who knows what reason, that ended up as a stabbing in our MIX inboxes. We cannot look at these things in only a regional context. The murder of Jasper Howard in Connecticut colors our perception, too. This looks like a crime spree. There’s anarchy in the streets. We’re living in the Old West here. Sometimes coincidental events cluster and take on the appearance of an epidemic. It doesn’t really matter which one of those this is; we have to blame someone, so let’s round up the usual suspects. Violent movies. Violent video games. Not enough cops on the street. Easy access to weapons. Rap music. George W. Bush. Easy access to alcohol. A focus on violence in the news media. President Barack Obama. I reject all of these answers. No correlation identifiable by sociology or criminology explains the problem quite as well as this: We are all a bunch of cowards. We have no self-confidence, no self-assurance and no self-control. We have terrible self-image problems. We must project an image of strength and ferocity and masculinity and control. When that image is challenged – not the actual existence of those things, which are rarely genuinely present, but merely the illusion of them – we are terrified. I am going to stop saying "we" now. I don’t belong in that cohort. I doubt many of you do either. There is absolutely no chance I will ever stab anyone in a fight. That is the behavior of the lowest animals – they strike not out of aggression or strength but out of fear. I have elevated myself above that. I will now address you – if you are anyone who has ever stabbed anyone in a fight, or pulled a gun during a fight or you habitually carry a knife or a gun or anything else that you think makes you look like a tough, nasty, "take-no-s---" kind of guy. You are a spineless, emasculated coward. That’s all you are. You’re afraid; you’re terrified; and you have nothing to protect except an image. If you are now, or ever under any circumstances might be, prepared to use a potentially deadly weapon to protect your image, you cannot be identified as anything except a coward. If you are the type to pick a fight over some perceived last-night slight or the type to brandish a weapon during such an occasion, you are just a small, weak, scared little man. A strong man can walk away. A strong man can laugh it off. A strong man knows there is more than this in his world, that there are things more valuable and more worthy of protection than his image. (I’ve said "man" over and over again for a reason – statistically, women just don’t do this kind of stuff. They often have a perfectly rational reason when they stab someone.) Let’s not kid ourselves any longer – that is all this stuff is about. There’s no broader theoretical, sociological phenomenon at work here. This is not about conflict across racial and ethnic lines, and it is not about the lone man protecting himself against a Hobbesian urban jungle from which monstrous men might leap out and devour him at any moment. People: You are in college. You live on a college campus and in one of the most crime-free states in the union. You have no battle to wage against society. The only thing nasty, brutish and short about your life: finals week. So forget all this nonsense. It’s all so old and tired, and so incredibly, painfully fruitless. Find some inner strength, leave the knife in the kitchen drawer and rejoin civilized society.
Violent campus criminals are nothing but lowly cowards
Published: Thursday, October 29, 2009
Updated: Thursday, October 29, 2009
5 comments
these people are probably drunk or high "Thug WANNA BE'S" who think it looks like a pansy to step down from anyone else... look at the lyrics that are building your kids.... words are life.... they make you, or obviously break you
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