Ignorance and innocence

Sometime in the past, I happened to watch Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a Palme d’Or winner in the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Based on the 1999 Columbine school shootings in Jefferson, Colorado, the film documents the facts, fictions, and similar realities in US high schools.

The camera panned out to the typical day in high school where ordinary and working students, high-class family members converge in an academic institution to study, play, work, or simply endure the day.

The film outraged my sense of normalcy and sanity when it showed how one student in the school entered the school and started killing students, teachers, staff and everyone else in the campus, as if he is in a Counterstrike game. Together with a classmate, the rebel student barraged the classrooms and school buildings with his high-powered firearm that he ordered through the internet and was delivered to his home when his parents went out to work.

The other students who are the main characters in the story would either survive or end up dead—depending on the circumstances they were in. In the end, the boy killed his own partner when he did not have anyone else to kill. In fact, the movie ended with the same boy cornering a boy and a girl who sneaked into the cafeteria’s kitchen to escape the terror, to no avail.

According to a source, the Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999 at  Columbine High School , in Jefferson County, Colorado, near the cities of Denver and Littleton. Two teenage students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a shooting rampage, killing twelve fellow students and a teacher, as well as wounding twenty-four others, before committing suicide. It is considered to be the deadliest school shooting, and the second deadliest attack on a school in US History.

A website source cites that the massacre provoked intense public debate on gun control laws and the availability of assault weapons in the United States. “Much discussion also centered on the nature of high school cliques and bullying, as well as the role of violent movies and video games in American society. Several of the victims who were mistakenly believed to have been killed due to their religious beliefs became a source of inspiration to others, notably Christians, and led some to lament the decline of religion in public education and society in general.”

As a consequence, the shooting also resulted in an increased emphasis on school security, and a moral panic aimed at goth culture, heavy metal music, social pariahs, the use of pharmaceutical anti-depressants by teenagers, violent movies and  violent video games.”

This world of ours ever witnesses a culture of violence every single day. Watching the movie, though, has made me think how our simple acts of indifference and apathy creep into the souls of people around us; and how, in fact, such acts affect them to do something worse than how they perceived such indifference.

It has also sent me into securing materials that could otherwise promote love and cooperation among students in the school where I taught. Consciously I started using class-motivation materials which could instill a sense of teamwork, self-respect and love.

For one, I used Blessid Union of Souls’ “I Believe” to help seniors in their pronunciation exercises. It’s a second look at racism and how we can help trash such stale, prejudiced attitude. To discuss ballads with the juniors, I used Cesar Verdeflor’s “22 Años” and Noel Cabangon’s “Lea,” two modern folk ballads that highlight the lives of men and women in the Philippine context. I also shelved Roman Polanski’s Macbeth [1971] produced by Playboy Productions. I willingly did so because of its violent content—the decapitation of the king as he succumbed to the consequences of his own greed and vainglory.

On the other hand, I used Asin’s “Ikaw, Kayo, Tayo” in order to promote to the schoolpaper's staff members their social responsibility as future journalists who are critics of the present society. The song inspires in them they have to recognize their own roles in order to effect change in the society—which is I think—why we are teaching high school students in the first place.

More important, I contemplated using Noel Cabangon’s “Awit para sa mga Bata.” In that song, Noel Cabangon does make a staunch statement on having to destroy the barriers between youth of all classes in society. Social realities make it clear that people exist on social classes; they sometimes live their respective stratum in society, its respective needs and wants, its sense of values or the lack of them.

Today’s young people are the chances of this present generation to redeem itself from tyranny, moral degeneration, and the indifference of its constituents. They are indispensable aces in life’s poker game—so to speak—where players by the name of ignorance, gross lack of knowledge and immorality have everything destined for them.

Today’s youth are the opportunities in life that rather pass unnoticed because of the grownup’s shortsightedness and self-absorption. Such dismal realities are driven primarily by guilt for its past sinfulness and misguided militancy, efforts wrongly directed and motivations largely by angst and malice.

Let the children’s free will and intellect do much of the reckoning. Let their freedom allow them to be themselves—happy and free.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

The moral degeneration of today’s youth is determined by where—what environment, forces, influences, temperaments—they are situated, where they live. By and large, they just live the culture that imposes itself on them.

Life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love.