***** The New York Times May 2, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 4; Page 17; Column 1; Editorial Desk HEADLINE: Littleton Takes The Blame BYLINE: By Alan Wolfe; Alan Wolfe, a sociology professor at Boston University, is the author, most recently, of "One Nation, After All." DATELINE: BROOKLINE, Mass.
Name a cause, and someone will find support for it. Shootings occur when you put guns in people's hands or violent movies in their VCR's, claims one group of Americans. On the contrary, argues another, kids go on rampages when you take God out of their schools and discipline out of their families.
The inexplicable craves an explanation. We are rarely content just to describe what people do. Instead we tend to view human behavior metaphorically, as if every decision people make -- from eating white bread to hiring au pairs -- tells us something about what kind of people we have become. And no aspect of the way we live now has been subject to more interpretation than the decisions of millions of Americans to live in suburbs roughly like Littleton, Colo.
The moment the news broke about the massacre at Columbine High School, stories of suburban life were offered to make sense of what happened. On the one hand, Littleton, a satellite of booming Denver, was a symbol of material success. Many of its houses had breathtaking views. Teen-agers drove fancy cars. They bought clothes from the toniest stores.
Yet, we were told, there was something hollow to the whole thing. Commentators implied that Littleton's residents, attracted to the superficial, were indifferent to moral principle because they did not see the rage building among their youth. The adage about knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing seemed confirmed.
After all, where there is money, snobbery cannot be far behind. People move to the suburbs, critics have maintained since suburbia began, to escape from the unfortunates left behind. Indeed these days suburbanites are viewed as fleeing from other suburbanites, creating gated communities around themselves to keep out the merely middle class.
If Littleton had its cliques, the thinking goes, that is because upper-middle-class suburbia is one big clique. Racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism, all of which were reported at Columbine, become examples of the kids doing to each other what their parents did to the "out" groups they left behind in the search for a better life.
As a new suburb, Littleton was particularly appropriate for free-wheeling sociologizing. Cities have neighborhoods, extended families, real stores actually owned by those who work in them. When you carve out new subdivisions, anomie spreads like strip shopping malls. In this view, the emptiness of Littleton's soul was caused by the emptiness of its landscape. No one can thrive in such artificial environments.
Thus Littleton became the lesson for every suburb in the United States. Flee crime in the inner city, the message seemed to suggest, and it will find you. Put your faith in the police, and the police will fail to do their job. Tell us of your deep respect for family values, but ignore your kids and their pleas for help. Take pride in your schools, but only to the extent they help increase your child's S.A.T. scores, even at the cost of undermining character.
But what if the lesson of Littleton is that there are no lessons? Americans do not choose to live in suburbia to find the American dream -- and certainly not to participate in our national nightmare. In fact most suburbanites do not choose to live in suburbia at all. The American upper-middle class, predominantly white, is long past the period when its members chose to leave the city for greener pastures; these days people with money are born in one suburb and move to another.
Middle-class Americans want to live in the suburbs because the suburbs are the only place middle-class Americans feel they can live. Not for them the chic world of Manhattan, in which a simple two-bedroom apartment can cost a million and in which all good schools are private schools.
Suburbanites know full well that life is not perfect where they live. Most of them can relate stories of estranged teen-ager behavior that seem eerily like the stories coming out of Littleton. But these are American problems, not suburban ones. Whatever caused the Columbine massacre, cul-de-sacs did not.
Suburban Americans find it hard enough to get by -- what with both parents working, kids listening to music they do not understand and playing computer games beyond their ken, and with traffic clogging the roads between where they live and where they work. They do not need the additional burden of being asked, against their will, to stand as symbols of the state of the national soul.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people because of their perverse belief that athletes and blacks were to blame for their unhappiness. We ourselves should not try to find an explanation for all of life's mysteries. Not everything requires a sociological analysis. The evil that was Columbine was not about franchise outlets, cell phones or cliques. It was about evil. *****
Wolfe slides from a sensible observation that not all individual behaviors are susceptible to sociological explanation -- much less pop sociologizing with its contradictory prescriptions -- into an odd & oddly tautological assertion that "evil 'is about' evil," probably motivated by his wish to defend the so-called "middle class" & suburbanization from critical scrutiny. Why does Wolfe need "evil"? Because without it his centrist celebration of Americanism (Americans value "tolerance" & are united by respect for "individual choice" -- mostly "moderates" just like Wolfe!) -- of which the so-called "middle class" in suburbs are, as usual, the central character -- might become compromised.
Yoshie