The Gods of Columbine High

The Gods of Columbine High

"They took my son. They threw him on the gym floor. They laughed and said they'd throw gasoline on him and set him on fire. They did this because my son is Jewish."-Father of a Columbine High School student, Littleton, Colorado.

The awesome awfulness of Columbine High strikes deeply into an American nerve. How could it happen? Why? What's to blame? Who's to blame? We've heard: (1) Hollywood, (2) video games, (3) music, (4) television, (5) Hitler, and (6) anger. As former president George Bush said, "There's enough blame here to spread around."

We've proposed cures: (1) hire more police, (2) install more metal detectors, (3) pay more counselors, (4) develop more parental involvement, (5) give guns to school teachers/principals/custodians (5) give teachers more courses to teach that will instruct in character development, in anger management, in self-esteem and (6) pass more than the 20,000 laws we have already for the control of guns.

It's interesting that students who used to be controlled by one teacher armed with a paddle now need to be controlled by police, metal detectors, and teachers armed with guns. (I remember a Mrs. Parker of Monterey Senior High School in Lubbock, TX, who could do more "controlling" with one paddle than any SWAT team today.)

But it seems these proposals deal with symptoms, and leave the malignancy alone, that these measures are Excedrin not surgery. It seems that all the diagnoses and all the proposals are missing the cause.

Professor Bloom hit the target years ago in his book, "The Closing of the American Mind," in which he said that all students today are thorough-going relativists. He said that if a person presents anything contrary to relativism, he's looked upon as believing in witchcraft.

Relativism is the belief that "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric." Relativism gives each person permission to decide what's right and what's wrong. All one needs to compose his or her own individual "lyric" is his or her own reasoning process.

As Eve stood before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, this is exactly what she was doing, she was becoming a composer, her own composer. It was she who would sing out what was right; it was she who would decide what was wrong.

Robert Bork points out the obvious problem: "…. reasoning requires a place to start; it requires major premises," ("Slouching Toward Gomorrah," pg. 276). The required place to start, we call presuppositions," and the Christian's presupposition is the God who has revealed Himself in the Scriptures (Proverbs 1:7a). Relativism is the weaver's beam by which we weave the clothing in which we dress to become our own gods and goddesses. The gods of Columbine High, dressed in trench coat-relativism decided who would live and who would die. No one right, no one wrong, if it feels good . . . . We each sing our own lyric. Your lyric may be sung to the accompaniment of exploding bombs and guns, mine may be to the sound of the movement of chess pieces on a table, to each his own. Or as Bork says, "One man's battery is another's sparring practice." Dressed in the treads of relativism, you can lie while looking another right in the eye, you can use speech in any way you wish; it's permissible-you're dressed for it.

We remember Bloom's statement, "Every student is a thorough-going relativist." About whom was the father speaking when he spoke of his Jewish son's being thrown down on the gym floor of Columbine High? He wasn't speaking of the Trench Coat Mafia. He spoke of the "admired" kids, the athletes. They're the ones at Columbine High who threatened to set his son on fire. The gods of Columbine High aren't so easily confined to the Trench Coat Mafia. The gods of Columbine High are on the football team, on the cheerleading squad, on the yearbook staff, on the faculty, and among the officers of the PTA.

The gods of Columbine High live everywhere. We're a society through which relativism has now metastasized. Relativism is now television's public morality, a morality that has not only infected the Trench Coat Mafia and the "good kids," but the parents of both as well.

When teachers are told to develop character courses, on what basis will they create the course's moral code? Who will create the major premise from which such a course begins? If we say anyone or anything other than the God of the Scriptures, then our courses will be created by the gods of Columbine High. Even though we may call them "philosophers," they are still philosophers dressed in the dark wool of woven relativism, singers singing their own lyrics. On June 26, 1284, a strange man appeared in Hamelin, Germany. Although poets have idealized this man, he became the first recorded serial killer in Europe. We've put him into the realm of the fairy tale, but he's based on historical fact. It's said that he contracted with the town to rid it of the detested rats that had so infested the area that people stepped on them everywhere they went. He fulfilled his contract, getting rid of the vermin by leading them to be drowned in the sea.

The people, relieved of their problem, refused to pay. The fairy tale says that he led the children out of the city with his music, taking them to a cave. But this one who became known as the "pied (because he wore multi-colored clothing) piper of Hamelin," didn't lead the children into a cave where they lived happily ever after. The pied piper massacred them. A hundred children dis- appeared. The pied piper of relativism has slain its tens of thousands, the gods of Columbine High are simply the most recent expression of his music.

Mike Halsey, Pastor

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