Kids Killing Kids: Olduwan Tools to the High-Powered Weapons of War
Thoughts on the evolutionary imperative of the emergence and impact of toolmaking
Whoa. Pretty ambitious: ‘thoughts on the evolutionary imperative of the emergence and impact of tool making’. Hm. What exactly does that MEAN? For some time, I’ve wanted to pursue and develop my own thinking on the nature and significance of the use of high-powered guns in the heartbreaking emergence of mass killings in American schools. From the start I’ve wanted to avoid adding to the narrow and limited dialogue about these shootings that we've been dragged sleepwalking into and become acclimated to. That dialogue has become painfully redundant and adds little to any necessarily deeper understanding of what this phenomenon, the repeated incidences of school shootings in the country, means from its most basic and limbic source in the individual and collective consciousness. It is hard to avoid adding to one or another side of a debate that has droned on and on with little or no impact on the regularity and horror of these massacres. I have nothing to add to that debate. I’ve known this for some time. My own attitudes and beliefs about gun ownership and weapons become quite useless. My thoughts about the nature of the state of mind of anyone, and especially any child, who might instigate such a horrific bloodbath, to me, are superfluous. They just add to the grief and denial laden noise that roars into the public forum when yet another group of kids is murdered. A quote from Macbeth, you know... the “sound and fury signifying nothing” bit... comes to mind, even if these events are quite considerably out of context in relationship to the play. Or are they? I just looked up the spelling of the play’s title to make sure I got it right and here is part of the brief explanation of the title that appeared when I tapped “Macbeth” into the search box: “It dramatizes the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power for its own sake.” Hm. I think I’d like to add that thought to my own growing catalogue of mental index cards as I proceed in my exploration of the cultural and even sociological significance and meaning of the emergence of the phenomenon of school shootings in American society. But beyond that... It is hard work to avoid being enveloped in the tremendous and unrelenting sorrow that these shootings illicit. It is hard to allow oneself to entertain thoughts about this stuff without one’s mental status eroding to the point of near collapse. In the past, the not so distant past, children’s deaths in industrializing societies were very common. Grief states related to the loss of children, as well as the possibly necessary avoidance of that grief and the matter of fact and compartmentalized way it was felt in the society at large, were woven tightly into the fabric of humanity for much much longer than has the emergence, at least in rich countries, of this brief period of time in which childhood deaths have become rarer and rarer, thought to be exceptional. One often hears it said when a child from a privileged, rich, society or community dies, that there is nothing worse that “losing” a child. But the rarer occurrence in human history is the lack of the common experience of children dying. The depressed historical life expectancies we read about, compared to our own era’s, are not as much a result of people not living into their 60s, 70s, and 80s, but due to the fact that many did not survive infancy, childhood or adolescence. Kids died. Entire families of them. It wasn’t that long ago. Early in my work as a family counselor with a hospice organization I ran into several elderly people whose first experience of death was the death of one sibling or more from influenza or typhoid. In my own family history, typhoid killed a number of my grandfather’s siblings and made him a virtual orphan because his father, who unknowingly brought the disease into the house, could not psychologically withstand the grief of the loss of his pregnant wife and one of his young daughters. He was admitted to a psychiatric ward and gave up guardianship of my grandfather. Are these deaths, the ones resulting from young people who use high powered weaponry to kill other young people, different? Of course they are. But how? And what does that difference mean? What does it look like? How is it expressed? I think what is not different between the deaths of children in school shootings and the historical deaths of children from disease and social maladies like hunger, war and poverty however is the manner in which the deaths, the phenomenon, are compartmentalized and evaluated by the dominant cultural stories we tell one another and are told by the predominant voices in the culture. In as much as the horror of these events seem to be a new and terrifying expression of some heretofore unacknowledged or misunderstood deep malady in the culture, the fact is that the numbers of those killed and maimed and psychologically wounded is nowhere near the number of children in the world, and in this country, who die from hunger, child enslavement, refugee status and acts of war. In our grief we rarely account for or compare the numbers of American children killed in schools with those other numbers. We rarely speak of the young African Americans, Native Americans and Latinx kids killed by guns... a number that, annually, vastly exceeds the number of kids killed in school shootings. I am not proposing that our grief and horror at these school shootings is not warranted or appropriate, much to the contrary. I think we are, in many ways, if anything, being lulled into a surreal and hard to comprehend acceptance of these events as they unfold, one after another. Terrible, terrible, terrible... numbers of dead, thoughts and prayers, the 24-hour news entertainment value, the profitability, of mass shootings, their employment in the feeding of the monster of our fierce cultural divide and all its components: class, race, desertion by industry, fear of poverty and abandonment under a largely unresponsive and faltering political system, alienation and misunderstood, misapplied rage at the nature of our cultural disillusionment. But, for now, I am more interested in the question of meaning. What does this emergence, this terrible barbarous beast of children killing children tell us about our culture and about ourselves? I can’t pretend to know the answer. Certainly, there are more answers than one. But when will we start to try to formulate those answers? When will we be actualized by that process? Why are we so inured to one or another kind of mass children’s death and so enraged and stricken by another? There are a number of fearfully gruesome fairy tales that tell the stories of stolen and/or murdered, even eaten, children. All of them are instructive when we consider our own inconstancy in regard to how we safeguard or do not safeguard our own children and the children of the fellow travelers on this vulnerable little ball of water and carbon. The Pied Piper of Hamelin especially comes to mind in relationship to how we routinely lull ourselves into a devaluation of our promise to the future and attempt to slip out of the constraints of the nature of our contract with the cosmos for our stay here... and our children are the ones who pay the price, with the loss of our children and what they symbolize, what they mean and represent, being the ultimate cost of our willful ignorance. If you’ll recall, the Pied Piper comes to Hamelin and agrees to rid the village of its plague of rats. He is successful, but then, once freed from the scourge of the rodents, the villagers back out of their agreement with the Pied Piper. “Pied”, by the way, is a reference to the Piper’s multicolored clothing and hat... like a medieval court fool. The relationship here between the appearance and promise of a fool and the Jungian symbol of the simultaneous wisdom and instructive folly of the fool, the coyote, and in fact, the Christ, seems worth mentioning. Anyway, in retribution, as you’ll recall, the Piper lures all the children of the village away with the same pipe he used to rid the town of its rats. One version has the children taken up a nearby mountain that opens up and swallows them. They are never seen again. The townspeople are inconsolable. If one enlarges all the aspects and characters in this Fairy Tale to their symbolic intent... if one interprets it as a kind of dream from the collective unconscious, the warnings and outcomes are clearly relatable to our current predicament with school shootings. There is also a modern novel, “The Children of Men”, by P.D. James (it is also a fine movie starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore). It is a the story of a future dystopia in which mass infertility has infected the human population. The story, in the movie at least, opens with the death of the world’s youngest person, an 18-year-old. News of this death is broadcast on the streets throughout the world as a great and mass-mourned tragedy. These scenes recall the reaction of the villagers of Hamelin to the loss of their children. The plot goes on to tell about the discovery and attempted rescue of a woman who is discovered to be pregnant. The only pregnant woman in the world. One scene unfolds in a long-abandoned school room. In a cross between what one sees in footage from the years after the abandonment of Chernobyl and what one might see after a mass shooting, the scene makes irrefutable connections between what is happening in human society now in relationship to how it treats and regards its children and what the cost may well be. And what that means. These are not easy stories, but I propose that if we fail to attend to them, to their meaning and how they play out in our own global villages and post-industrial landscapes, we will be forced to become more familiar with them as they play out in our lives, unprepared for their arrival. Now, about the title of this little foray into the meaning vs the particulars of school shootings: My original thought in approaching this topic had been that I would explore the nature of tool making in the species, how it has informed and co-evolved interactionally with our brains and our exponential growth, both on an individual level, physically and intellectually, and on a collective level. I wanted to think and record my thinking about the evolution of our tools related to how they are used, even in their most evolved and complex ways, in self-defeating and even directly and indirectly suicidal and homicidal ways. I had hoped to make connections in meaning to the emergence of the phenomenon of weapons that are designed for war, for killing other people, being employed in the mass shootings of children by other children. If you’ll recall, Olduwan Tools were rudimentary tools used by the direct ancestors of the human lineage and were the first archeological evidence of tool-using among those in our direct ancestral line. They were discovered near the Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. My first ruminations about the connection between those tools and the use of high-powered weaponry by children to kill children progressed along a line of thought that, while recognizing the co-occurring increase in the complexity and intellectual capacity of our tools and our brains, in their actual use we have not really evolved morally. Not really. I was flooded, almost against my will, with images of all the evidence that while tools have become more superficially sophisticated and have been a great aid to our brain’s (and the collective’s “brain/s’”) ability to organize and dominate the landscapes around us... to butcher and eat our prey, to develop and implement more efficient ways to grow and harvest food, to manage and heal disease, and to protect and enlarge our spheres of livelihood and community... they have not compelled us to short-circuit, effectively counterbalance, our propensity to do ourselves and others, the world we live in, irrevocable harm. The image at the end of this flood of images, of course, was the mushroom cloud.... and a bloody school yard. There is a movie “The Fifth Element” that also informs and demonstrates this great quandary. I would say THE great quandary. The character of “the Fifth Element” in the movie, a perfect and powerful woman, is a being that is an ancient and ultimate weapon against forces in the universe that would destroy all sentient life. In the penultimate scenes, she has become potentially mortally wounded in the battles between the various elements that would employ her to save the world and those that would destroy her and all life, but in spite of her wounds she is still being called to do her work against the great force that threatens to extinguish life on the planet. She says, out of the blur of her injured state, weeping, and as she recalls the world history lesson she digested in light speed early in the action of the movie, something like “What is the use of saving life if all it wants to do is destroy itself?” It is a good question. And may, as well, be its only answer. ***
***
When the Mountain Swallowed Them
Some kinds of silence leave a hollow
in the air: mute, deaf, like overlapping
stones that shine and sail around
the sun moaning through the moonlight.
When the mountain swallowed them
their laughter became memory, like a spring
from a cleft in a knoll out of the root
of a tree, water that always travels,
the first song departs and some other sound,
another stream of chants, is born but no
the little jingles they were taught
swilled into nothing. It was the first
part of that profound loss the people
from the village understood, having believed
until then the children would be returned.
It was the final imprint, the nature
of the consequence of the promise they had
broken. And then, swelling, nothing like their dirge
was ever heard before or after. The mountain
soon swallowed that too. The mountain
would always draw its dark silent hump
against the sky. They went on, joyless,
day to day as they approached
the end of their days and they were always
approaching the end of their days.
Without the children even memory
of what they had once wished for was buried.
When the mountain swallowed them,
their offspring, there was no place left to be
reminded of all those little hands
or the promise of their dreams
***