Editor-At-Large: A little more love and 12 victims would have lived
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Independent Minds
In just two minutes, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer killed nine former classmates and three teachers and injured seven people before fleeing the school he'd once attended.
He went on to murder three more bystanders before turning his gun on himself. Most of the victims were female. What an appalling waste of young people who hadn't even started on the great adventure of adult life. There has been much debate about whether remarks Tim allegedly posted on an internet chatroom the night before were a hoax, but it doesn't matter – their sentiments are horribly accurate. He complained "I'm sick of this life ... everyone laughs at me."
Lack of self-respect and poor self-esteem lie at the heart of this tragedy. Tim was failed on every level – by his middle-class parents, his unfriendly fellow pupils and by the psychiatrists he visited only last year. A lot of the deep-seated loneliness this boy so clearly felt is very common at his age. Young men are deeply adrift – and when there are knives and weapons available, there are bound to be innocent victims.
Teenage boys have an image problem – a survey by Women in Journalism (WiJ) showed that time and time again young men only get written about in the media in negative terms. Over half the stories WiJ found linked teenage boys to crime, and the terms consistently used to describe them were yobs, thugs, sick, scum and feral. The only time they got written up positively was generally when they'd died, and only one in 10 stories about young men included their point of view.
We know that some young men are under-achieving, and now it's got to the point where this negative reporting of a small number is affecting how they view themselves. The survey found that many now fear their peers, and avoid places where they hang out. It doesn't take much to see that one of the reasons many young people started carrying knives is rooted in anxieties like these.
Emphasis on image and appearance rules teenage life here, and it was no different for Tim growing up in a small town in Germany. Having the right clothes, the right music and the right friends is paramount, and when you fail to fit in then the internet and computer games can be used to try and fill the void. But online friends, as I've said so many times, are no substitute for the real thing.
Tim had a tough time at school – he looked nerdy, wore glasses, and found it hard to make friends. It's said he was taunted by other students and one teacher told him he was a failure who would end up as a dustbin man if he didn't work harder. He'd had feelings for one girl, but they weren't reciprocated. He'd left to study at a private college, and his periods of depression had become so marked he'd paid five visits to a psychiatric clinic in 2008. If Tim didn't fit in at school, then things don't seem to have been a whole lot cosier at home. Three weeks ago he wrote a letter to his parents about how unhappy he felt.
As a teenager, I wore thick National Health specs, had sticky-out teeth and horrible beige hair. The other girls had bigger tits, and my legs were like matchsticks. There were no chatrooms then, but I channelled all my differentness into a feeling of superiority – if they didn't want to be friends with me, it was their loss. I became a swot. But how many kids are that thick-skinned?
Tim's father has a lot to answer for – keeping 15 guns at home and allowing his unhappy son to practise target shooting with them for hours in the basement seems poor judgement to say the least. But guns aren't what drove Tim over the edge – he was lonely and had zero self-esteem. The lessons to be learned from these sad killings aren't about gun control. They are about helping young men to have pride and dignity and a sense of worth. Once they retreat into a fantasy world online, or the violent world of computer games, it is harder for them to function in the real world of work and relationships. Young men need urgent help at school to develop their emotional intelligence, otherwise there will be more killings.
Glamour politics I see you're still avoiding celebs, Gordon
Two years is a lifetime in politics. We know Gordon Brown might not be ready to say the "sorry" word, but he's man enough to realise that his philosophy about celebrity culture needs to be dumped if he wants to get on the front pages of the newspapers in stories that don't focus on the financial crisis. In April 2007 he said: "I think we're moving from this period when ... celebrity matters, when people have become famous for being famous." Can this be the same Gordon Brown that sent Jade Goody his best wishes and "applauded her determination" last month, and cosied up to Cheryl Cole and Kimberley Walsh outside Downing Street to "celebrate" their climb up Kilimanjaro accompanied by 120 porters, 32 production staff, a team of doctors and two film crews? Did our starstruck PM raise the embarrassing point that Gary Barlow chartered a private jet to fly the celebrity climbers home, blowing £50,000 which could have gone to charity without adding to global warming?
Baby Palin won't hurt grandma
Her mum thinks the best form of birth control is abstinence – but Bristol Palin, right, disagreed, claiming it "wasn't realistic". Republicans were astounded when their vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin paraded her large family on the convention platform last September – including a pregnant teenage daughter and the father of her child, (her high-school lover). Now, keeping with the Palin family tradition, Bristol's baby has been given a wacky name – Tripp. Sadly, the teenage lovebirds have split. Sarah Palin has been plagued by bad press – she spent thousands of party funds on swanky clothes for her family and it was proved she used state funds for their personal holidays. Nevertheless, pundits feel an unmarried daughter with a baby will do her political ambitions for the election in 2012 no harm – it just makes her fans relate to her even more. God help us.
We need a minister for Cool, too
Australia's minister for the environment, Peter Garrett, was a successful rock star before he entered politics – fronting the controversial band Midnight Oil. Now the band is reuniting and he's performing a series of fundraising concerts for the victims of last month's bush fires, starting this weekend. What an inspiring gesture.
Back in the UK we have the hapless Secretary of State for Children, Ed Balls, waffling on all fronts about learning lessons after Lord Laming's scathing report into the state of child protection in England, which ended with the chilling words JUST DO IT!
Ed Balls can't even run one career, let alone put on a night in my local pub to raise funds for our battered and beaten kids. Political office is proving a very difficult job for this lacklustre individual. Coco the Clown would probably achieve more.
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Comments
I just add on the day GordonBrown called Ms Goody "Jane Goody" it would have been surely a more sincere gesture if he had taken the time to reserach the girl's name correctly rather than trying to get the "Sound Bite" across !
This is Gordon Brown all over,just typical of his behaviour. No one punts Celebrity role model more than he does but unlike Tony he doesn't quite carry it off ........
I think at the core of our society we need to get our children to be more inclusive. Rather than picking on the shy, nerdy guy, why not invite him to your house, to your party, to your afternoon swimming at the lake? Make him feel like he is truly part of the group, rather than an outsider. It would cut down on things like this happening.
As long as teachers and parents stand idly by while the teenage mob preys on the weak, humiliating and excluding them, every once in a while one of them will get a gun and take his revenge on "every motherfucking last one of 'em".
And perhaps yourself, heaven forbid.
2. Then why are you, as a woman who has mercilessly attacked men during your voyage of self-discovery, a suitable person to address these issue?
The issues are clear:
1. Masculinity and male respect from women is at a low ebb. The women demand far more than they provide and blame men for not being women. Any man with self-respect ignores them. Any other man either turns in on himself or turns on others.
2. There is a very great likelihood that communication in his family was abysmal. If he wrote them a letter, my guess is that his parents were emotionally cold or defensive, just as they had probably been whenever he had been an open boy with them in the past.
3. Normally such situations occur because the mother combines emotional coldness with controlling behaviour. Their verbal skills undermine the young boy and he seeks solace to cover up his inadequacy.
4. Because society will not address the issue of women being incompetent mothers to sons, even if they are good mothers to daughters, the issue is never addressed.
5. Are you honest enough to admit that or is this, as usual, another male deficiency?
Street-Porter makes barmy connection after barmy connection in support of her barmy assertion, without a shred of (even barmy) evidence in support of it. This penchant in celebrities to comment about things they know nothing about drives experts to distraction.
If Street-Porter was remotely near the mark in her analysis, killings of this nature would be commonplace. They are not, of course. Why didn't that unexceptionable observation cause her to think for just a moment? I'll tell you why; she had nothing to say and a deadline to keep.
I had an awful schooling, bullies were rife and made my life hell, I was a skinny, nerdy-looking waif of a kid, an easy target. The teachers were abusive and patronising, I watched one kid who had stomped too heavily on the gymnasium floor whilst running up to the wooden horse being slapped with such force that his ears bled, this kind of violence was not unusual. My parents were on a different planet and didn't understand a word I said and, totally alienated, I drifted into petty crime as a way of "getting back" at the society that made me so unhappy. This was the result of bitterness and ignorance in equal measure, actions that I am rightly ashamed of.
Then one day, a police inspector (which cautioning me for a petty offence) explained that I was just being a self-absorbed idiot, that life didn't owe me anything and that I was totally responsible for my own actions. Then I realised there were no excuses and that I was just acting like a spoiled brat in assuming anything different.
Yes children need guidance, but I cannot find any solid justification for a 17 year old "middle class" European murdering people. You make a good point about schools fostering a sense of respect and dignity, but you cannot assume that had these been in place, these murders would not have happened. I can postulate another whole pile of possible histories under which he would have been a different character when he reached young adulthood, constant exposure to guns would not be a factor in any of them. Let's face it, teenagers are as driven by hormones as by reason. At this age above any other, Hume was right - reason is slave to the passions. If my own background, as well as those of my classmates, is anything to go by, a hormonal and sensitive teenager with constant access to guns and live ammunition is not a great idea.
"Lack of self-respect and poor self-esteem lie at the heart of this tragedy." There are no shortage of people with low self esteem in Britain today, yet only a very tiny percentage ever commit murder and on the flipside, there are enough cases of wealthy people committing murder. I do not wish to overgeneralise here, but I've studied the accounts of many murderers (psychopathology as part of my Psy degree, I'm no closet stalker) and in many cases it's not lack of esteem that shines through, more an ego the size of a planet. Overcompensation? Maybe - the jury is still out.