Right now, I'm watching the interview of the parents of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the first school mass murderer in Finland, who killed 8 of his classmates and then himself in November 2007. I was in Australia then and it didn't really sink in. This phenomenon repeated in Kauhajoki just over a month ago, and the police just released information yesterday that they thwarted a nearly finalized plan to undertake the same in a new school. Looking at the world that kids have to make sense of, having been a kid not too unrecently and now seeing the way this is publicized in the country, I won't be surprised when it happens again.
Interestingly and importantly, the Finnish media never really judged what had happened in Kauhajoki. Blame was found in the school, in the police, in the gun salesman, in the internet (YouTube, again of course) and in the man's lack of friends. He was 22 years old, and all of his behaviour mirrored closely that of previous school shootings in the US and Finland. He may have been immature, but the event certainly enlarged the scope of school killings. And he was victimized. He was "driven to do it", he had "lost his faith in humanity" he was "depressed and lonely". Fuck. Sounds like a lot of people I know, or at least knew in school. And that includes high school and college.
The media in Denmark and Sweden, for example, called him a "lunatic" or "mass murderer". This rhetoric was never entered into in Finland. There was very little value judgement. It was a tragedy - it was lamented, but not really condemned.
And now, watching the parents speak of the first event a year later, the whole act of senseless violence, this attack against everyone's lives and our way of life, is rationalized, explained and put into place. The parents described the ways he was bullied in school (shot with airsoft guns of his way home, made fun of in front of the class...) and how he had in tears asked his mother why he had no friends, "no-one to even play Playstation with". While the parents say they still can't really comprehend what happened, to a detached observer it perversely sounds to make sense. How many 15-year olds read the papers and watch these documentaries (this one was widely promoted on Channel 3 in the past two days), feel confused, uncertain and abandoned by the world, and place their lives in the category of the school killer - the person who "was driven to do it"?
The documentary closed with an analysis of children's psychological disorders and potential risk groups, commented on by an expert closer to 70 years of age than 60, and who said that all behaviour that deviates from the norm should be intervened. How does that sound to the teen who is just forming his or her view of the world and their own place in it? Do they accept an intervention where the choices are made for them? This young person is at a stage in their life where they are just starting to taste the freedom of making their own choices, at the same time seeing that the array of choices available to them is bewildering. Instead of facing the burden of endless choice, do they drive themselves to a situation that ends all pressure of having to choose, where the only choice is the one that they have positioned to themselves as inevitable?
School massacre is not a choice that should be on anyone's list of options for the future. But like with suicide waves among youths (one seems to be at a tipping point in Finland in Piikkiö, a municipality of 7,500 people where three suicides and one attempt have occurred among youths this fall), there seems to be a need, or at least a tendency to rationalize this behaviour. This is a typical Finnish trait - we need a reason, we refuse to not understand, and this reason needs to be as objective and detached as possible. A reason like that can also be accepted by more people as the truth, no matter how perverse it might be.
Maybe we should understand less, accept more, and aim for sympathy instead of the truth? But along with sympathy to the suffering youth, there must be a value judgment made against the most radical of choices, and this is a practical moral demand, not a theoretical one. While we can argue for (and I often do) and against moral relativity, ending extreme symptoms of suffering is a practical necessity, unless we succumb to absolute nihilism. Do we really believe it is wrong to kill others, no matter how much suffering they have caused us? Yes? No? If not, what is the limit of suffering, and how do we make sure we don't reach it - the point of no return? The shootings are a symptom, not the illness. There is much to be done to heal the nation.
