In the wake of the Littleton killings last week, the entire nation has
unleashed a storm of finger pointing in a desperate attempt to find
out what drives people to such insane acts.  After all, if we can not
determine the reason, how can we take action to prevent it from
happening again?

And so, everything from trenchcoats to Goth culture to the Internet to
violent games was initially blamed, with concomitant crackdowns on
anything even vaguely resembling these culprits.  A Slashdot-led
backlash has begun, blaming the culture in schools which marginalizes
outcasts to such an extent that they think extreme measures are
reasonable.(1)  Everywhere on the Internet, people are passionately
debating the balance between freedom and safety, and what could have
been done to prevent this tragedy.

These reactions provide us a chance to examine our culture and why it
places such a high value on finding a culprit.  From a nation that
prides itself on its self-reliance and worships the ideal of the
rags-to-riches story, America has decayed into a morass unwilling and
possibly unable to take responsibility for itself.  We may have grown
more sophisticated since the Red hunt of the McCarthy era, but we have
grown no wiser.

And why is that?  I propose that it is a reflection of the
fast-changing and technological society that we live in.  We are
surrounded by a bewildering array of objects that we do not
understand.  All of us have experienced the sheer frustration that
occurs when something is broken and we have no idea on how to fix it.
Computers are particularly notorious for engendering such reactions.
And yet, such tools are indispensable to our modern lives.  It is no
longer possible, even for highly intelligent people, to fully
understand every object necessary to their everyday lives.

Confronted with mysteries of weather and fortune, primitive man
created gods to explain them.  Confronted with the mysteries of
technology, we have come up with our own myths to explain our
problems.  We feel, nay _know_, that there are powerful unknown forces
at work in our lives that we do not comprehend.  Such forces can
clearly be blamed for all the myriad problems of our lives.

Everywhere we turn, the same point is hammered home: it is not our
fault.  Unemployed?  It's those foreigners taking our jobs away.
Injured by a tool?  It's the fault of the corporation for not putting
in enough safety features.  Kid not doing well in school?  It's the
school's fault for not being strict enough.  This attitude is
reinforced by a legal system that is used as a punitive agent to assign
blame and extract recompense, and by a government that tries to be all
things to all people.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the idea that a butterfly
flapping its wings in Alabama may be enough to change the weather in
Borneo.  In modern life, the causes have become similarly difficult to
trace.  We live in a complex world where there are no easy answers,
and no easy way to assign the blame.  Any or all of the reasons
mentioned for the Littleton killings may have contributed, but none of
them can realistically be singled out as _the_ reason.  

In a scary world where nothing can be predicted, what can we do?
First, we must stop trivializing problems by implying they have one
and only one cause.(2)  This behavior produces more harm than good, as
evidenced by the accounts on Slashdot of students who have been in
contravention of the cause du jour and been punished for it.  

More importantly, we have to take control and responsibility
for our own lives.  Events can and will happen outside of our control,
but that does not mean we have to surrender all responsibility.  A
friend of mine used the example of being hit by lightning: just
because we can not predict when and where lightning will hit does not
mean we are totally helpless.  We can take reasonable precautions such
as not standing in open fields during lightning storms.  We can also
take paranoid precautions such as never leaving the house.  

The Littleton killings were a tragedy.  But the answer is not to take
paranoid precautions such as forcing all students to dress the same,
and not letting them speak their minds at all.  By listening to them,
we can learn how to identify the contributing factors, and learn to
take the reasonable precautions necessary to head off similar
incidents.  And maybe, just maybe, by taking responsibility for our
own lives and those of our kids, we will not have to repeat the same
incidents over and over again, never learning that all of the
"reasons" examined in the media by the government will not save us.  

(1) http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml

(2) Phil Agre eloquently makes this point in a recent post to
    red-rock-eater: http://www.tao.ca/wind/rre/0683.html