LETTERS FROM HOME: THE SEARCH FOR THE DARKNESS IN A 14-YEAR-OLD'S HEART

Dec. 11, 1997

Dear Leslie,

Cape Girardeau is about 70 miles from Paducah. The two cities are like fraternal twins, both about the same size, both situated on a big river. Before cable TV, Paducah had one of only three channels that could be received in Cape Girardeau. We watched and contributed to Paducah's telethon for kids with muscular dystrophy, and on Friday afternoons through the '60s and beyond watched their healthier kids do the Mashed Potato on a show called "Dance Party."

Now we are haunted by Paducah's tragedy, a 14-year-old boy killing three of his classmates. The haunting comes from proximity and familiarity, and from the knowledge that the wound to the human spirit could as easily have been inflicted here.

The preachers on TV have tried to make sense of it, and they can't. Over and over you heard "They're in a better place," but even if true that isn't much comfort to the rest of us who aren't. We're in a place where, an alien looking at our culture would immediately surmise, people solve problems with violence. Some even believe violence wins.

Inevitably, we discover that violence isn't worth idealizing. But we're ambivalent about it. The resolute non-violence of a Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. seems, well, almost unmanly.

We are queasily fascinated by the literature of the murder in the human heart, from the abject horror of "The Silence of the Lambs" and "In Cold Blood" to the sanitized deadliness in "Murder She Wrote." That our species kills itself off, sometimes one by one and sometimes en masse, and that some of us seem to enjoy killing both frightens and intrigues us.

Where we go wrong is to hide from the reality we have created.

Our culture rationalizes many kinds of killing. We put murderers to death, which is to say we kill them. We killed Iraqis when they threatened our oil supply. Who among us would not kill in self-defense or defending those we love.

We are murderous and we are loving. To pretend this darkness does not exist in the human spirit allows it to fester there until the next outburst. The next Paducah.

Right after the shootings, I talked to some educators who blamed the culture and particularly the media. If the lesson of many movies and television shows is that the good guys can save the day by bludgeoning the bad guys, we have gotten it well.

Certainly, students in a prayer circle aren't the bad guys. Just as certainly, someone who steals weapons so he can coolly kill classmates is disconnected from his feelings for them and from his feelings of membership in the human race.

So the struggle between good and evil continues in the evening news. The more innocent the face of evil the more difficult it is to call it inhuman, the more difficult to claim immunity.

Paul Simon has been criticized for basing his new musical, "The Capeman," on the life of a teen-aged killer. But Simon says this isn't glorification, it's examination.

Anybody who feels affected by the Paducah killings should examine how our natural born killers are created.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.