Parents responsible for children's acts

ll right, that's it. I'm fed up, and you should be too.

What's going on in the world today when kids are killing other kids for no reason whatsoever?

As if you didn't already know, last week two Columbine High School seniors walked into their school of 1900 students with sawed-off shotguns, pistols and pipe bombs and proceeded to systematically murder their fellow classmates.

So there's obviously a serious problem in America today, and it has many facets of blame.

First off and primarily - though you never hear a news reporter say it - these kids' parents are to blame. Where the hell were they when their kids were constructing dozens of bombs in their garage? People go on and on just as they always do when something like this happens with, "He seemed so quiet, intelligent, harmless. He was bright and had so much potential." As if intelligent people can't be violent, twisted people? Wake up!

Then there's the school system in America today. It is a system where kids are relentlessly picked on and persecuted every day of their lives so that when they finally snap after years of psychological and, in many cases, physical torment, suddenly everyone's shocked. "I couldn't believe something like that would happen here of all places!"

Yet everyone at Columbine, just like at most educational facilities around the country, admit to treating the now-infamous Trenchcoat Mafia like the outcasts they were. They admit to ignoring their emotional needs and discriminating against them for being quiet, anti-social or weird. How come the school didn't get these kids psychological help when they wrote poems in class about death and made videos for classes which depicted scenarios that actually came true on April 20?

This is all the fault of parents. Parents have made school officials afraid to discipline children for fear they will sue them for yelling at or punishing a child. And, no, what I mean by discipline is not hitting the children with a paddle.

But America's educational institutions are so terribly lax in their motivation to punish kids and teach them right from wrong because everyone feels, "Well, it's the parents' responsibilities to do such things."

It's too bad that parents aren't disciplining their children either! They're too busy with their jobs to actually spend one minute with their lonely and affection-starved kids to even know what the hell's going on with them.

There's no structure in these kids' lives. School is a torturous experience where everyone segregates themselves into little cliques, and those who don't are constantly persecuted. Then at home, things are just as bad, if not worse. Parents come home late, exhausted from work and their own problems, and their paths never cross with their children's.

Instead, kids turn to video games, television and the internet for companionship. Such trivial technological wastebaskets should not substitute for the love a parent can give to their kid around the dinner table in a healthy and supportive environment. Instead of Marilyn Manson and Hitler, kids need real role models like their parents or a teacher at school.

I don't know what's going on. But something is taking place in this once great and safe country of ours. It may be genetic. If we tested the parents of these juvenile monsters, would we see that they lack certain genes that produce a conscience?

That's what it seems these kids lack. And remember, I'm not just talking about the incident at Columbine. I'm talking about kids out there still alive, who still have a chance that only we can give them.

Wake up and do something. Don't simply sob for those dead at the Columbine massacre. Prevent it from happening again.

John Burgoon is a freshman majoring in
creative writing.

Copyright 1999 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 136, No. 64 (Wednesday, April 28, 1999), on page 5.