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Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive.
Editorial: 6/18/99 When a drowning man feels his lungs filling with water, he'll do something,
anything,to stay alive. He'll grasp at the skinniest of twigs for rescue. And that's
what the House of Representatives has done, allowing the Ten Commandments to be posted in
schools and government buildings. Not that there's any harm in having them on the wall.
They might even do some good, especially in the Oval Office, especially the "thou shalt
not covet" part.
But just framing them and having them looking down on a classroom or courtroom is
not going to change much about the culture, which is the real reason we're flailing
around. We've created an in-your-face who's-the-man anything-for-a-buck culture of
isolation and cynicism, and we're surprised that it's eating our young.
Take the selfish cynics who say guns alone are the problem, and just regulating them
will take care of everything nicely. Since Israel and Switzerland are two of the most
heavily armed nations on earth, we should expect to see kids running amok in the
schoolyards of Zurich and Tel Aviv. We don't.
Then, there are the terminally self-righteous pulpit-pounders who say the
viciousness of our society is the media's fault, what with violence saturating video
games, movies, and TV. Fine, except that America's biggest export is entertainment, and
you can reasonably expect that kids in Italy and France and Argentina are watching pretty
much the same movies, rotting their brains in front of pretty much the same TV, and
thumbing the controls of pretty much the same video games as American kids. And
classroom slaughter isn't a problem in Paris or Buenos Aires or Florence.
And of course, there are people who think guns have nothing to do with this at all,
which would funny if it weren't pathetic. Some companies are making assault weapons and
cheap pistols with one aim--killing human beings. Some gun dealers make a living selling
guns they know will be used in a crime, and know won't be used by the person who bought
them. Some psychos, whether it's unstable kids, militia wackos, or street corner crack
dealers, can get their hands on guns far too easily.
What every one of these parochial opinions ignores is that America stands almost
alone in elevating selfishness to an art form, greed to a minor deity, and isolation as a
way of life. Cut isolated and edgy kids off from any feeling that they're part of
anything bigger than themselves, and you've lit the fuse. And since everything from
isolation inside your hermetically sealed car to walling yourself off in your distant
suburban community of choice is now officially defined as the American way of life, we've
almost become too isolated from each other to carry on a meaningful conversation about
much of anything.
The poison of that sort of isolation long ago seeped from our everyday lives into
our political life. Never mind that it was run badly, the President's defenders
trumpet. The war in Kosovo worked. Never mind that more than ten thousand men, women,
and children are known to have been slaughtered, tortured, and raped by the Serbs, say
the President's opponents. It was Bill Clinton's war and therefore it's all bad.
In fact, maybe we've become so isolated from each other, so selfish, and so self-
righteous that the Ten Commandments wouldn't do much good. We'd probably just start
arguing over what they mean. The thou shalt not kill part? Does that cover the death
penalty? How about abortion? And here we'd go again.
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