Columbine Could Have Forced America to Improve; Instead, it Created Woke Culture
Society reacted the complete wrong way to the 1999 Columbine massacre and, over the course of nearly 25 years, these events gave birth to woke culture.
As a quick refresher, nearly 25 years ago, two bullied and unpopular teens in Colorado fed off each other’s angers and insecurities and (likely) mental illnesses. At school one day they murdered one teacher and 12 students. They injured 24 students and staff members.
As a response to Columbine, educators nationwide engaged in a misguided but well-meaning attempt to stop bullying and, by extension, future school shootings. They encouraged students to treat all other people the way they wanted others to treat them. They urged students to tolerate and even embrace other people’s differences, beliefs, and personality traits.
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There’s nothing wrong with that, right?
The problem is these well-meaning people failed to realize that bullying is a fact of life. They failed to teach children how to stand up for themselves. They failed to realize that these children are not children as much as they are future adults. They failed to pass on to those children that life, even as an adult, is sometimes no different than a junior high school cafeteria. Awaiting those future adults are countless obstacles, many occasions of hardship and, sometimes, hurt feelings and social ostracism.
Everything in life is a matter of proportion. Over two and a half decades, teachers kept pushing envelopes and pushed things further out of proportion. In trying to make students more moral, they made themselves and their students amoral. We morphed into a society with no absolutes.
FRAGILE FEELINGS
Contemporary teachers tell students that feelings matter more than facts (there are more than two genders, morality is relative, privileged people are wicked, etc.)
Has all this wokeness stopped additional school shootings like Columbine? Have all these efforts bettered young people’s overall mental health?
Not just no…but hell no.
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Since Columbine, copycats have carried out mass shootings at schools nearly every school year. Now, even embittered and mentally disturbed 20-year-olds break-in to the schools they once attended to kill innocent children.
One young man carried out a mass shooting not at a school, but in public because he didn’t know how to interact with the opposite sex.
A 25-year-old Beverly Hills man went to federal prison this year. His crime? A woman he briefly dated called things off with him. To cope, he tried to hire a hitman to kill her.
Social media apps like Tik-Tok and Instagram encourage and enable narcissism among the young. These apps create infamous internet personalities who are, to put it mildly, socially challenged and attract cyber-bullies worldwide.
The 2007 Virginia Tech shooter gave off a plethora of warning signs. Political correctness handicapped school administrators from doing anything to remove him from the school before it was too late.
The U.S. military now worries more about recruits’ fragile feelings instead of winning wars.
Now, U.S. President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) says public schools nationwide must treat students of color who disrupt class more leniently. These restorative justice programs seek to rehabilitate offenders rather than punish them. Even the liberal Associated Press admitted these policies increase school violence.
ADVERSITY
To quote an economics professor of mine, “Junior high school and high school students are, by nature, sociopaths.”
The Netflix series Cobra Kai tackles this topic brilliantly. The show’s message to high schoolers is that the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to one.
The public schools would do well to teach that message instead of trying to rob children of valuable life lessons or leave them unprepared for life’s many adversities.
Adversity builds character.
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Adversity forces people to rely on their own ingenuity to get by in life. Parents and educators would do well to understand that truism. Parents and educators would do well to know that a child’s mental health is just as important as his or her physical health.
As I said last year, when society declares war on God and the traditional family unit and goes totally secular then don’t act surprised when young people kill wantonly and without remorse to compensate for their lack of coping skills with life’s many challenges.
Some of these old conservative traditions were in place because the people who passed them down understood human nature exceptionally well. Those people also understood the conditions that human beings needed not only to thrive but to do so in a stable environment. Those traditions were in place for good reason. They were literally the glue that held society together.
As awful as Columbine was, something good can still come from it.
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