Month's atrocities could've been prevented with friendly interaction

(Last updated: 08/28/09 6:14pm) What do a courthouse, a church and a school have in common - aside from being the foundations by which the law, spirituality and education are, respectively, delivered?

All three are places you can get shot.

Here, in this country, March Madness has taken a literal connotation.

If you are clueless as to what I'm talking about, let me fill you in.

On March 11, a man who had been charged with breaking into his ex-girlfriend's house and raping and sodomizing her repeatedly over a three-day period went on a rampage. Brian Gene Nichols, 33, alledgedly overpowered a sheriff's deputy in an Atlanta courthouse and took her gun. He then shot a judge, court reporter and deputy. A massive scale manhunt ensued after Nichols fled the scene and eluded capture for days.

Sick yet? It gets worse.

March 12, only one day later, Terry Ratzmann, a 44-year-old computer technician, opened fired on his fellow members of the Living Church of God in Brookfield, Wisc. Ratzmann entered from the back of the room and began firing at people whom he had worshipped with for years; he even had time to change ammunition clips before he turned the gun on himself.

In the aftermath, seven were dead and four were injured. No one who knew Ratzmann could understand why the typically quiet guy had gone off the deep end. Some speculated that it was a Bible prophecy of doom that upset him.

The month of carnage, however, was yet to be concluded.

On Monday, 16-year-old Jeff Weise entered his high school in Red Lake, Minn., killed seven people and wounded as many as 15 others before taking his own life. He had killed his grandfather and another person prior to the school shootings. The incident is being labeled the next Columbine. Biographic information on Weise paints a troubled teen who wore black and eyeliner, frequented Nazi Web sites and donned a trench coat.

So, to blatantly stereotype, we have a sexual offender, religious fanatic and gothic Nazi, all turned murderers. Is it just me or did the nation snap this month? It's sick to imagine what's going on in the heads of some people who inhabit the United States.

A message posted on the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party's Web site, www.nazi.org, said the party wouldn't wring its hands over the tragedy because Weise had been a visitor to its site. Although I'm not often inclined to agree with Nazis, I do agree with their calling the event a "symptom" of people being crammed into an unthinking, irrational, modern society. For a few to show such stunning disregard for order, there has to be something inherently wrong with the whole.

So, what do we do?

Well, the first thing we shouldn't do is pull out our Marilyn Manson CDs and violent video games to find answers. If you look at the unique demographics of these killers, they obviously all don't fall under the same category of psycho.

There isn't one miraculous answer to handle all our problems. The real answer is found on a daily basis through positive personal interaction with one another. Yes, I'm saying we need to be nicer to each other.

All of these people were seemingly antagonized by society into a position where they found it rational to commit murder.

Weise, who lived on a reservation and claimed to be a Native American National Socialist, expressed his frustration with society on a Nazi Web site's message board. He wrote: "(P)eople are so misinformed, ignorant, and close-minded it makes your life a living hell."

I hope I don't sound sympathetic to these horrible figures. They made terrible personal choices that are unforgivable. My aim is just to try and take people away from more sensational explanations of these actions when trying to make sense of these tragedies.

In a day and age where only customers can use bathrooms, everyone tries to cut each other off in traffic and no one wants to be on the streets, let alone say "hi" to one another, what sort of mentality do we expect people to have?

Joseph Montes is the State News opinion writer. Send him a cheerful "hello" at montesjo@msu.edu.

Originally Published: 03/24/05 12:00am