by John B. Rickman rickmanjb@earthlink.net
Whenever one of these ninety day wonders like Littleton happens the "viewers with alarm" round up the usual suspects, or as Peter Bearse puts it, trots out the "same shopping list of potential remedies".
After viewing with alarm the events at Littleton, Mr. Bearse trots out "values education," the usual suspect that traditionally heads the shopping lists of conservatives.
Sorry Mr. Bearse but we have all "been there, done that" and it doesn't work!
Take Christianity, for example. Back in 1776 only about
18 percent of the population identified themselves as Christians and
by 1789 it had dropped to only 15 per cent.1
This was in the urbanized east. Out west the percentage was somewhere
around 5 percent! This despite the fact that the ratio of ministers to settlers
was five times higher than in the east. In fact it was a common assumption among
the pioneers that headed west that they were, in part, fleeing the interference
of Christian Blue Noses in their lives.
How about sex? Those who preach traditional values would have
us believe that it was only since the sixties that sex outside of marriage
became commonplace in American culture but; a recent examination of court
records, birth certificates and family Bibles reveals that fully one third of
all brides in Colonial America were pregnant at their weddings.
As Mark Twain said about babies: "The first one can come at any
time after the wedding. All the rest take nine months."
Abortion? Thirty percent of all pregnancies in Colonial America ended
in abortions. Infanticide? Fifty percent of girl babies died in the first thirty
days of birth compared to ten percent for boys. The most common cause? Suffocation!
Well at least "traditional America" was less violent -- right? Wrong! This
is probably the period of lowest violent crime in American history! What evidence
can I come up with to support this claim since there was no central body keeping
crime statistics until the F.B.I. started earlier this century.
Only anecdotal but none the less compelling. For example, Arthur Feleig
(a.k.a Weegee) the famous news photographer of the Forties, personally photographed
five thousand murders in New York city in the period from 1943 to 1948! That is
more than three a day for one man and he had the negatives to prove it.
H.L Menken, the famous Baltimore newspaper man, while working the night
shift back around the turn of the century, had a rule for himself and all his
reporters, they couldn't go out drinking with the gang each night until they
had filed their first homicide, or serious violent crime of the night (one
filing per reporter). The guys had usually gotten their first story of the
night and were gathered at the bar by ten o'clock every night!
Youth violence? Billy the Kid had killed his first man by age
fourteen (which was not all that unusual) and had killed twenty more by
the time he was old enough to vote. Most cowboys who gunned each other
down in the streets of the old west were younger then the boys at
Littleton and Senator Strom Thurman's father, a lawyer in the rural
South around the turn of the century, gunned down an unarmed man in
broad daylight in front of witnesses and gave as his only defense at
his trial "the man dissed me." He was acquitted. It seems that it
was a "traditional value" to kill anyone who dissed you in the old
South!
Conservatives tend to be very poor historians, they have the
bad habit of viewing the past through rose colored glasses.
The fact is that we are in a cultural high point in American history
and the only thing that would make things better would be the decriminalization
of drugs, which would lower the crime rate, and cut back on youth violence by
removing the source of money which most young violent offenders use to buy guns.
If anything, the attempt to cram conservative dogma (in the guise of
"traditional values") down the throats of America's youth might have the exact
opposite effect from that hoped for.
A recent political cartoon by Ted Rall of Universal
Press Syndicate shows a youthful offender explaining the roots of
his behavior to a Congressional panel. He explains that he needed
to express his violent and aggressive impulses vicariously but
everywhere he looked violent video games had been banned and
all his favorite porn sites had been blocked on the internet.
This was bad enough but what finally drove him to disembowel the
marching band was the school prayer group!
1The Churching of America by Roger Finke & Rodney Stark 1993