How can a country that can’t handle a stupid tweet from Roseanne Barr possibly do anything about school shootings?
We can hit the delete key on someone who has offended the wrong people, and make her disappear. We can’t do that with killers. We can’t even judge them too harshly. We offer them a seat at the table:
“What do you need? How can we help?”
A few days after Dimitrios Pagourtzis killed 10 and wounded 13 at Santa Fe High School in Houston, Texas, I went to the Outer Space Gallery in a residential neighborhood in Northeast Portland for a show called “Welcome to Your Cell,” which included “6×9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement.”
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, which seemed a perfect counterpoint to experience a Virtual Reality solitary confinement cell. The contrast should have made the nine minutes in the cell seem even worse.
The gallery is in a small converted garage that feels almost like a boxcar. Step inside and once the door closes behind you, it’s pitch-black. Through the V.R. headset, you’re standing in your 6-by-9-foot square cell. There’s a tiny table bolted to the wall and a small round stool attached, a toilet and sink in the corner, a narrow cot, a food slot in the door. Inevitably as you move around with the headset in the dark, you bump into a wall, which underscores how tiny and confined the world is.
Prisons can be noisy places with no privacy, even in solitary. The background noises in this virtual reality cell include angry voices and no acoustics to soften their edge.
While you’re moving about your cell – hovering over the sink, the cot, the table then back to the sink, the cot, the table – the ceiling closes in. A man’s voice recalls his first days in solitary, dreaming about happier times. Then one day he realizes he’s dreaming about being incarcerated. Even in his dreams, he’s locked up.
When the nine minutes were up, I took off the headset and stumbled outside into the bright sunshine.
“There’s rosemary over there,” said a soothing voice belonging to a young woman with long dark hair. “To help you adjust to the outside.”
I declined to smell the rosemary but asked her: “That guy who shot up the school a few days ago – do you suppose if he had seen this first, it might have given him second thoughts?”
The young woman looked surprise.
“That’s an interesting question,” she replied.
Another woman, sitting at a tablet with leaflets about prison reform, offered me the scent of a red heirloom rose.
I posed the same question to her, and she also termed it “interesting.” But she looked me over, as if trying to figure out where I was coming from.
Finally she said, “You know some people get sent to solitary for having too many postage stamps.”
I didn’t tell her that postage stamps have a fascinating history with prison inmates. Years ago it was discovered that LSD could be concealed underneath stamps on letters sent to inmates from the outside. Pull off the stamp, lick it and take a trip. These days, with tobacco products now prohibited, postage stamps have become popular prison currency. An inmate caught with hundreds of stamps has likely been selling contraband.
The point of this gallery show – as in so many news stories, books, TV shows, movies about prison inmates – is to create empathy for prison inmates. To help them build a narrative.
It wasn’t surprising when Pagourtzis was arrested after the school shooting in Houston that he told investigators he didn’t shoot students he liked “so he could have his story told.” He was looking ahead to his narrative while planning the kill.
Would spending nine minutes inside a V.R. solitary confinement cell have made Pagourtzis change his mind? Probably not. Popular culture has turned prison into an intriguing and brave lifestyle.
By now Pagourtzis, who is in solitary confinement at Galveston County Jail, might be wishing he had killed himself as he originally planned. Or, he could be adjusting to a new reality that is more exciting than being an ordinary student.
His father has already declared his son a “victim.” Pagourtzis’ attorneys blame teacher-to-student bullying. Families of four of the victims are suing the father, blaming him for not locking up his guns.
As usual, guns are a more convenient enemy. They’re tangible. We can see them.
It’s human evil we can’t see, even with all of history and current news proving its existence. Our failure to do so is what weakens our existing gun laws and makes new laws questionable. It would be easier to support more gun laws if they targeted criminals.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban as part of his Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which increased federal prison sentences, especially for inner-city drug dealers who were destroying black lives and black neighborhoods.
More than two decades later when his wife ran for president, she apologized to Black Lives Matter for her husband’s crime bill. She didn’t have a problem with the assault weapons ban, just the prison sentences.
We now have media and politicians from both parties portraying America as a prison state.
The phrase “school-to-prison pipeline” is tossed around as if it were a fact. If such a pipeline existed, Nikolas Cruz would not have been free to kill 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida. He had a history of disciplinary problems and had been expelled for bringing guns to school – yet he had never been arrested.
After the Florida shooting, there was what the media called a youth movement with marches and demands that “something” be done. Several nationwide chain stores agreed to stop selling certain types of firearms, which was more of a symbolic victory. Guns are not going to disappear.
Last week, a junior at Tualatin High School in Oregon took up the same youth-movement rallying cry in an op-ed published in The Portland Tribune.
“Please do something! …” wrote Emma Chamseddine. “I feel hopeless, I feel sad and I am angry. … (T)he gun policies are not working, the mental health system is not working, and our Congress is not working.”
Chamseddine is 17, the same age as Pagourtzis. She exercised her frustrations with life by writing an op-ed. He exercised his by shooting people. They each made a choice. Nowhere in Chamseddine’s op-ed, though, does she blame the shooter. She condemns gun policies, the mental health system and Congress.
If this is the youth movement that is going to save us, the next school shooter is probably working on his narrative and fantasizing about an art exhibit in his honor.
He will likely have more sympathizers than the next Roseanne Barr.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be in high school today. I do know I had an advantage four decades ago. We looked forward to growing up and being treated like adults. Everyday injustices and cruelties were rife at my school. We didn’t call them micro-aggressions and feed them with revenge fantasies. You sucked it up and looked forward to getting the hell out.
Years ago when I was living in Southern California I had a hairdresser from England. He asked me once, “What is it about Americans and school reunions?” It was that time of year when there were a lot of school reunions, and he was inundated by customers wanting to looking especially good to impress their old classmates.
Where he came from students completed their studies and moved on. They didn’t drag their school days around with them forever.
We add so many unnecessary pressures on kids — sports, popularity contests, extracurricular activities and, increasingly, sexual distractions. What’s it like to be in school now when you have students making an issue over their sexual orientation, or posting names in the girls’ restroom accusing certain guys of sexual misconduct.
We heard about the high school girls in Portland who outed some boys for being sexual bullies or something. We had a lively discussion at our first barbecue of the season. The girls lost. This is getting ridiculous. I remember flirting with all kinds of girls when I was in high school. They flirted back. That’s part of adolescence. The adults have lost their minds if they give in on this.
On solitary confinement, you know there’s a move underway to ban it? If Brown gets elected to a full term I’d look for her to pursue it. She’ll cite expenditures. If she’s lucky it won’t become an issue.
Flirting? How quaint. There was a remarkable story in The New York Times Magazine four months ago called, “When Porn is Sex Ed.” It was about what teenagers are learning from online porn. The writer visits with students in South Boston taking a class called Porn Literacy. Since teenagers — male and female — can easily access porn, they are learning a warped view. Most porn shows females responding to aggressive males. Sensitive guys are not sexy. It is suggested that the antidote to this is feminist or ethical porn. So … in addition to everything else kids are expected to learn before graduating you can add “Being good in bed.”
About Gov. Brown: She will stay away from making solitary confinement an issue because it’s one where many Oregonians probably disagree with her. Like you say, though, it is an issue waiting in the wings. A couple of years ago, I attended a performance called “Within These Walls: An Evening About Solitary Confinement” at the Cerimon House in northeast Portland. Among those participating was state Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland). She is House Majority Leader and is committed to ending solitary confinement.
http://www.heldtoanswer.com/2016/10/jury-verdict-moral-awakening/