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LITTLETON SCHOOL MASSACRE IS A TRAGIC WAKE-UP CALL!
By Don Fass
The April shootings at the Littleton, Colorado high school that killed 15 students and a heroic teacher gave warnings heard all too many times before and yet, tragically not heeded.
Consider: for thirty years, all too many teenagers have been growing up alone.
Consider: Guns are still too available to kids as well as those adults who would harm them and those other kids not dealing with their feelings.
A few weeks after the tragedy, the Natle Rifle Association was holding its annual convention in Denver, while elsewhere in that city, Star Wars fans were preparing to greet George Lucas' Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, with its continuing fable of the Force vs. the Dark Side.
Consider: West Hollywood tried to de-rail a successful program to help street kids and runaways there because they preferred to continue neglect, rather than be embarassed by attention to their street population. Oakland's City Childrens Fund, and Clorox Corporation twice rejected a combined after-school teen computer and citywide central childrens resource center that already had all the computers and materials donated, while Medford, Or police closed down a volunteer teen center doing much good and harassed the founder, a woman, out of her life-savings poured into it.
Consider: Leading Corporate Foundations like The Gap and numerous others, including community funders like the San Francisco Foundation, as documented by the San Francisco Bay Guardian almost 2 years ago, play politics with their money, rarely fund grassroots programs and often don't give away the 5% of assets required by law.
Consider: States and counties spend far more on prisons than after-school preventive programs to help youth. The Federal 'War on Drugs still devotes most of its effort to law enforcement, unsuccessfully, rather than prevention and treatment.
Consider: Millions of American children are physically or sexually abused, run away, grow up with no parents home or surrounded by domestic abuse or alcohol or other drug abusing parents or in dire poverty..
Consider: The hate that is taught to many young people or that they see their parents still ingraining in them. Look at the death of young Matthew Shepard in Montana or the two teens in Littleton who timed their long-planned violence to coincide with Adolph Hitler's Birthday. Or that sawed off shot guns and pipe
bombs were in plain view in the room of one of the teens who killed so many in Littleton--the parents must have known.
Consider: In Littleton, as in many other places, there was much advance warning of the threats, instability and alienation of the youth who went on such a horrendous killing spree, but nobody spoke up, nobody tried to counsel them or accept them or get the law involved.
And on and on it goes till millions and millions more Americans decide to join 1000's of volunteers, teachers, dedicated youth workers and many others who are sacrificing their lives and livelyhoods for our youth, crying out for more drug treatment, helping street kids, conducting conflict resolution and sensitivity
training in schools, offering realistic sex education (that includes loving values), taking guns off the streets, running programs like 'Scared Straight,' creating realistic drug prevention unlike DARE programs, while providing real time to help, after-school centers to turn lives around, much more mentoring, more day-to-
day-concern about their kids lives from parents and so much more that is needed by so many more young people.
Until our children become our true national priority, tragedies like we have seen so much these past several years will keep happening over and over, whether adults hurt children or kids keep killing kids.
