>>> S Pawlett <epawlett at uniserve.com> 04/28/99 01:27PM >
Why are white male adolescents engaging in killing sprees? Besides the
obvious access to guns and the wherewithal to carry them out, one thing
that has not been commented on by PSN members, is that one underlying
dynamic is a relative decline in white skin privilege and patriarchy.
White males defined as losers, when by all accounts they belong to the
dominant social categories are denied their birthrights. This would
account for the racism and sexism of the killers. It also accounts for
their desire to kill those who are "good" or who are successes. No
longer can white males automatically derive status from their whiteness
or maleness. They feel threatened by upwardly mobile minorities and
striving women. They want to keep them in their place. Therefore, they
become the targets of male hatred.
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Chas.: Current KKK programs are based on these characteristics in adults as well as youths.
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One other thing I found out in my study is that interpersonal competition has been intensified throughout the years. Young people must deal with academic competition, an intensified and diversified sexual competitive struggle, and a hip competitive struggle. In my study, I found that HS kids felt highly vulnerable to attacks on their selves and attempted to fend off such attacks by adopting a persona that was viewed by themselves as false. One could be a loser in so many ways; the peer group was extremely mercurial, at one time providing support and at another being extremely cruel.
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Chas.: High school is the rat-race of capitalist alienated society in proto- and in miniature. The solution to this general problem is socialist culture, the end of dog-eat-dog competitiveness as the mode of existence of society. These low quality of life conditions are not taken into account when measuring whether the American system is providing more freedom than others. Living in a dog-eat-dog , isolated, lonely world is not freedom. It is this individualist faux freedom that neo-liberalism is trying to spread all over the world as "free" enterprise and democracy. The high school in question probably had a booming "economy". Its community is benefitting handsomely from the current Wallstreet boom, no doubt. But the bourgeois culture is inherently a war of all against all ,as in Hobbes' imagination; the more Wallstreet booms, the more its collatteral damage ,some failed petit bourgeois warriors, will boom; and so the chickens come home to roost.
Hitler committed suicide after he finished his rage too.
Charles Brown