This time the cry of anguish emanated from Lake Worth, Fla. and echoed across the face of the nation, intensifying the pain in such wounded communities as Pearl, Miss., West Paducah, Ky., Jonesboro, Ark., Edinboro, Pa., Springfield, Ore., and Littleton, Colo., where the joking Columbine killers had carried out the most murderous attack on a high school in our history.
On the last day of school in Lake Worth, a bright thirteen-year-old, a student leader, after being sent home for throwing water balloons, armed himself with his grandfather’s Saturday night special, returned and killed one of his favorite teachers.
The cries of anguish are once more followed by the usual question: Why? By now, unless you’ve been spaced out on the fourth planet from the sun, you know the familiar explanations by rote, handy guns, dysfunctional families, violent video games and movies, songs in praise of brutality, social outcasts, faulty genes, and the list goes on and on, while the killings multiply.
The search to control violent behavior has taken some deadly twists and turns. In Evergreen, not too far from Littleton, Colo., pseudo-therapists wrap patients in blankets to create for them a return to the womb and then a rebirth to free them of an attachment disorder that causes unmanageable behavior. During her (mis)treatment, a ten-year-old girl was smothered under blankets and pillows until she choked to death on her own vomit. More promising than the rebirthing therapy are CT scans that may reveal a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. This brain abnormality, according to a recent article in the Archives of General Psychiatry, "may drive criminals’ violent outbursts." If it is possible to identify a potential killer in his early years through magnetic resonance imaging, should we tattoo a red stain on his forehead, a strawberry stigma, the mark of Cain?
ONE DEAD: BROTHER MAIN SUSPECT
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That might have been the headline on the front page of the East Eden Times. What prompted a youthful farmer to turn savagely against his younger brother and kill him? When confronted, he denied committing the murder and tried to shift the blame by asking: "Am I my brother’s keeper?"
Why did he decide to kill?
Everyone is searching for answers, but no one asks the right question. Without warning, why would a deeply religious adolescent, the first son ever, surrender to a murderous impulse? What signs were there to warn that jealousy and rejection could give way to an unbridled passion strong enough to destroy human life?
Knowing that they have lost two sons at the same time, his parents are devastated. The mother said: "They were still boys, just boys. We tried to raise them the right way, but maybe we spent too much time at working the fields and not enough time with them at home." Her husband Adam insisted that he had spent time with them, especially with Cain by teaching him to hunt, to respect the power of weapons and the realities of life and death. "Abel didn’t like killing animals. He was so gentle and just liked to spend time alone tending his flock," his mother said. "Did he cry out for help? I loved him so much. Did my boy ask for me during his final moments?”
The latest trouble resulted from a competition between the brothers to see who could make the better sacrifice. Abel offered the best of his flock to the Lord, while Cain brought the fruits of the field. It has been reported by reliable sources that when Abel’s offering was selected, Cain flew into a rage and claimed that if the Lord had been a vegetarian he would have won. He also accused the two of them of killing helpless sheep. In the grip of the dark side of his nature, Cain gave warning enough that he might be his brother’s killer, not his keeper.
No weapon was found at the scene of the crime, although Abel’s blood in the ground, which Cain once so proudly tilled, testified against the attacker. Abel’s body indicated that Cain had no role model for murder. His first attempts failed. He tried to pull off an arm and then tried to crush Abel’s head, but the human body can be quite resistant. Now marked forever as a murderer and soon to be farmed out as the first member in God’s witness protection program, Cain was heard to say: "I’ll be a fugitive the rest of my days. My punishment is more than I can bear."
The finger pointing is sure to go on for centuries to come. Some believe that Cain was the product of a dysfunctional family. After all, a bad apple falls close to the tree.
His parents were evicted from their original home for a crime of high disobedience. It is also fabled that Adam had an extramarital affair with Lilith, an evil woman with strong ties to the devil, a really bad snake in the grass. If the first family was rotten to the core and passed along a defective gene, Cain never stood a chance.
His only companion was a sheep-loving brother. No girls around to help release high levels of testosterone. No peers to form a clique. No prom for Cain at the end of his home schooling. Desperate for attention, he invents the burnt offering contest and loses out to his brother’s lamb fat, followed by a lecture from on High to stop being jealous and making faces and flirting with inherited evil. The rejection and the jealousy could lead to the killing fields.
Or lead to a school shooting.
Aren’t we all the children of Adam? Are we eternally doomed never to learn justice from injustice?
FATHERS AND SONS
The bonding between fathers and sons has often been prickly affairs. From those love-and-hate relationships have come some of the most disturbing and memorable biblical quotations. Just before Jesus died on the cross, He cried out: "My God, my Father, why hast thou forsaken me?" That’s a question a child of a single-parent home might ask today.
An equally poignant question, perhaps the most chilling one in literature: "Father, where is the burnt offering?" Later, tied to the altar, with his father poised over him holding a knife, Isaac realizes that he is the sacrificial lamb. At the last moment, an angel stops Abraham from killing his own son.
Nothing more is said about what happened to their relationship. Would Isaac ever again be able to look in his father’s eyes and trust him? Do some modern fathers come close to sacrificing their sons without knowing it? By spending too much time at work? By allowing their sons unsupervised use of violent computer games? By setting a bad example of drunkenness or drug addiction? By physical abuse? By watching TV and not communicating? Absalom, King David’s handsome, long-haired son, rebelled against his father, plotting to become king in his father’s stead. In battle he rode on a mule and caught his hair in a tree. A soldier of David’s army, finding him suspended, killed the son in spite of previous commands. The King’s expression of paternal grief reaches our hearts even unto this day: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee."
Should the parents of the high school killers be held responsible for their sons’ violent actions? Closer supervision of their sons’ bizarre behavior and their fascination with games that allow scattering of body parts in Rambo style might have prevented the tragic gun fire in Littleton. But just suppose their sons were natural-born killers, emotionally twisted and deeply flawed from birth, bearing the mark of Cain. What then?
"Oh no! not another school shooting!"
