Dan Fishback: An empty approach to victory

Authorities are pleased in New Bedford, Mass. They were tipped off by other students. They found a homemade bomb in the attic. They found photos of the boys carrying guns. They found shotgun shells, knives, even a plan of attack: bomb the school, shoot students, commit suicide before the police arrive. Last week, those police arrested three boys and charged them with conspiracy to commit murder. No one died. Victory.

A Boston criminal justice professor was pleased by this turn of events because, "it shows that more and more students are willing to come forward and inform on classmates."

Another "positive development" is the proliferation of so-called "school resource officers" -- liaisons between students, teachers and the police.

Schools across the nation have profited from our newfound "understanding of the way juvenile plotters work and how to stop them." A half-dozen massacres have been averted in the past year. Victory.

Now, we'll be able to catch homicidal teenagers before they do their thing. I wonder, though, if anyone would rather stop homicidal teenagers from becoming homicidal in the first place.

After Columbine, after Santee, everyone sat around in big Kumbaya campfire circles and hoed and hummed about why white kids want to kill each other. With Columbine, the circles lasted a while. We were caught off guard. So we sung our sad songs and went back to business as usual.

We ran back to the campfire after Santee, but didn't stay long at all. The media aftermath of these killings was significantly shorter, confined mostly to a discussion of anti-bullying legislation and the murderers' childish appearance. It didn't seem so urgent. Not as many people died. The kid didn't seem as threatening. Celine Dion didn't show up to sing to the wounded. We only made it to the second chorus of "Kumbaya."

Last week, we didn't even make it to the campfire. Why would we? -- nobody even died.

Death I am disturbed by. Death I am saddened by. Death is one thing -- murder is another. And the scary thing about murder is not its execution but its development -- the ammo stockpiles, the how-to-make-a-bomb pamphlets, the plan of attack. After Columbine and Santee, I was upset by the killings, but I was equally upset that someone actually wanted to kill. And that's no different in New Bedford. There's no blood, thank goodness, but there's still hate and callousness and pain.

So while it's all well and good to see the police pat themselves on the back for preventing murder, where are the sociologists, the ministers, the rabbis, the artists? Where are the thinkers we count on to decipher our culture and tell us what went wrong? Where are they? They're here. They're us. They're our old teachers back home. They're our younger siblings. Our parents. And we've been negligent.

Or perhaps just distracted. After all, we're fighting a war. We're bombing terrorist camps. We're crippling the aggressive power of a dangerous nation. We're preventing terrorism. We're preventing death. Victory.

Now, we'll be able to stop terrorists before they do their thing. I wonder, though, if anyone would rather stop them from becoming terrorists in the first place. I wonder if we shouldn't rather publicly question our foreign policy -- our embargoes, our relationship with Saudi Arabia, our attitude towards the United Nations.

I don't know how to decipher the long-term causes of terrorism anymore than I know how to stop kids from wanting to kill each other. But I do know that "school resource officers" won't always work. I do know that bombing raids won't always work. I know that no matter how many kids we arrest, and no matter how many terrorist camps we blow up, the hate and pain will remain.

We are being directly threatened from within and without. So we can make things safe for tomorrow -- search lockers and pelt the land with bombs. But we can also make things safe for next year -- take a step back and discuss. I am not suggesting that it is foolish to strategize against homicidal teenagers or to destroy terrorist training camps. But, alone, these efforts are practically worthless. Murder is chilling, but so are murderous thoughts. Those thoughts we must uncover, understand and not just prevent, but solve. Only through active, substantive dialogue can we achieve a victory that won't beget more loss.

Dan Fishback is a junior English majorfrom Olney, Md.

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