Elephant

Last Saturday, the older members of our family watched Gus van Sant's film, Elephant. Monica (my sister) is in a play about a school shooting, and her director suggested that she see Elephant, as it deals with the same touchy subject.
The movie was, in a word, disturbing.
I don't just mean gory-images-that-keep-you-up-at-night disturbing. I mean disturbing. It really rattled me. Of course, now, a week later, I've sort of lost that sense, but it was there.
The amazing thing about Elephant is that it's so real. It takes place at a high school, and we watch various characters, students within the school, going about their daily business. But as I was watching it, I realized that what I was watching (which, by the way, was totally without plot, like a regular day) was real. The students walked, talked, acted, spoke, and swore like real high school students. And their experiences throughout much of the day, while mundane (for a few hours) were still fascinating. For example:
A student ducks into a lounge of some sort and cries some brief tears of frustration after having been given detention again after being driven to school late by a drunken father.
Another student wanders about campus, snapping photos of fellow students he comes across, and later moseys into a darkroom to develop them.
Three girls go to lunch together, chatting and gossiping. They get into an argument, but quickly recover. After having had perhaps three bites of salad apiece, they leave the cafeteria, and head for the bathrooms. Still chatting, as if they were all just going to get their hair done together, they step into the stalls and make themselves throw up.
So go the first few hours of the day (van Sant messes with time on us, showing us this day as well as the end of the previous one, from varying perspectives), perfectly normally. Then, Eric and Alex arrive.
After they arrive, the mood of quiet fascination with which you've been watching this totally normal and inoffensive day changes, descending into vague panic. Because you've seen these two guys before, this morning and in the previous evening, and you know what's "going down", as one of them says.
You're still panicky as you watch them gearing up in a hallway, which is totally empty except for a seemingly oblivious janitor at the end of it. They then proceed into the library, and the first shot is fired, and the first victim slumps at the foot of the bookcase. From there, all normalcy of the day (and the movie) is lost, and it descends further into the unreal, dreamlike horror of a nightmare. Eric and Alex proceed up and down the halls, literally shooting anything that moves, their faces totally expressionless. They kill without reason, discrimination, or mercy. No one makes a move to stop them, and soon, the halls are littered with bodies.
It is really strange, though, as van Sant doesn't show us much reason for Eric and Alex to behave as they do. We see one of them get splattered, deliberately, by another student with some substance during science class. We see one of them playing a violent video game. We see that they are a gay couple, something they've probably endured some abuse about. But nothing concrete, nothing so terrible that it would have pushed them over the edge.
As my mom asked, how is it possible for people to become such hardened sociopaths at such a young age? They show absolutely no hint of remorse as they shoot anybody, not just people who abused them. And from what I've heard, that was what Columbine was like.
Some frightening factoids go with this subject:

• Violent video games, such as Doom, use the same sorts of tactics as used in the Army to desensitize soldiers to killing real people.
• Michael Carneal (a shooter in a real school shooting) was said to have been an Atheist, or to have at least associated with them (in the play my sister's in, Give a Boy a Gun, one of the shooters, Brendan, vehemently denies the existence of God).
• Every two hours, a teenager commits suicide in the U.S.

As the film's synopsis says:

Elephant shows high school life as a complex landscape where the vitality and incandescent beauty of young lives can shift from light to darkness with surreal speed.

It is, truly, surreal. And it does beg the question, why? Why is it that seemingly (or not) normal young men and women suddenly take the plunge, for no apparent reason, into pure evil? For that is what the shooting in Elephant is. Sheer, cold, unloving, unthinking, uncaring evil.
Why?
For our sakes, and for teen's sakes, let's answer that question. For this sort of thing can happen anywhere, at any time. In fact, it did happen in a town not to far from my own, a small one, at that, and that's what scares me. Evil does not care; it will consume whoever's handy. Let's put up them rods, before the lightning strikes again.

Hooray for Friday

The second full week (sans Monday) of frosh-hood over at high school has passed quickly and fairly *cough* uneventfully--for me. Not so for dad, who had to put up with a gobsmackingly bad day this week that I know few details about. All I know is that one of the students down at school (dad teaches at the place--and no one knows who this kid is) committed some as-yet undescribed atrocity against my dad in comfortable anonymity. As we were leaving today, we noticed some shattered glass had been placed conveniently under our car's rear tire. Suspicious.
Anyhoo, aside from that, and the flooding of our basement, which I will leave to padre to describe,--as he has already done so pretty effectively--not much happened.
However, that doesn't mean I don't have a rant coming.
An irony that I observed both at my Catholic grade school and here at Catholic high school is that many of the kids are totally and comfortably oblivious of their faith and its meaning. I realize that was a disgracefully sweeping, judgemental statement to make, so lemme rephrase: it seems that many of the Catholic school kids are as far from Catholic as any others. I could always be wrong, but the evidence suggests it.
For example, I've overheard a couple of my fellow freshmen mispronouncing the word "Catholicism". Granted, that's no "Dick, Jane, and Spot" type of a word, but still. Come on, people!
Another example: Every Friday, everybody comes to school dressed up and we have Mass in the gym. We have Mass at the time we regularly have a twenty-minute or so break; a snack break for many people (even by 11 A.M.--roughly the time we have Mass--you can get pretty hungry). However, since you are not supposed to eat anything one hour before receiving Communion, snacking in the brief break before Mass is strongly disadvised. If you forget, though, and end up eating something absent-mindedly beforehand, you may pass up on Communion.
So here's what happens: A couple of starving classmates grab something munchy last Friday before Mass. When another student reminds them they shouldn't eat, the response is: "I don't care, I just won't have Communion."
Do I see a priority problem here?
Granted, an empty stomach is a powerful force, but it is obvious that these guys don't at all appreciate or understand what Communion is.
Religion class is the most noisy and disordered one we have. Another thing that seriously bugs me.
F-bombs are dropped regularly by the students. Not that that surprises me, it happened in 6th grade, too.
Of course, school is by no means a cesspool of depravity, or anything like that. It is run by very skilled, caring, well-meaning people who know their faith and what they're doing with it. And not all the students are clueless, by any means. There are many who do care. But there are many who don't either, and that's what gets me.
Enough rant.

Oy vey

It has been quite a week.
I have heard that Hurricane Katrina was the worst national disaster to happen in our country since the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, possibly worse. And I can't say I disagree. For the past week, the news has sounded like excerpts from Left Behind or The Day After Tomorrow.
We all know, however, that the hurricane itself wasn't the remarkable thing, but its aftermath. New Orleans is no longer a functioning city. How often does that happen? How often does a city's law and order, it's people, even its buildings, go completely down the tubes?
It's the sort of thing you usually only see in movies.
An entire residential neighborhood covered in water, only the tops of the houses and trees poking into the air. A few days ago, there were people on those rooftops, waving their arms and shouting hysterically to get the attention of anyone who can get them out of a dead house; a dead city.
A Wal-Mart with its windows smashed and automatic doors gaping open, maybe forced open with a crowbar. Out of one set of doors comes a haggard, unshaven, dirty man, with perhaps a cart of bottled water and canned or dehydrated food, running back to a family crouching amidst sopping, oil-slicked wreckage. Out of another set of doors comes another man, but he has an iPod stuffed in one pocket, a CD player in another, and is hefting along a TV in his arms.
An alley with filthy water sloshing around ankle deep, in which a pair of looters beat a man to death for something he has in his pockets.
Abruptly and for no apparent reason, an entire side of a warehouse explodes.
These sorts of things have become everyday events for Big Easy, and perhaps in other nearby towns, as well. The interesting things about times of difficulty, though, is how they bring out the best in some and the worst in others.
Worst: As a helicopter descends to drop much-needed supplies, a group of hooligans/looters/other opens fire on the helicopter for, as far as I can tell, no reason.
Best: A twenty-year old finds a school bus with keys miraculously still in the ignition. He drives over to the Superdome, packs it as full of refugees as he can, and drives 500 miles to Houston.
And then, of course, there are the people who perhaps aren't especially good or bad, but are at least keeping the real bad guys at bay:

In a situation like this, what's a person on the opposite side of the country to do? Yes, you could donate money, blood, or supplies. People across the nation have done this, to the very great benefit of Southern citizens. But many of us, even after donating, perhaps have a feeling of guilt at our uselessness.
That is where prayer comes in.