Cameron Duodu:LETTER FROM THE NORTH
`This is not my house!” the little boy shrieked. By one of those magical interconnections that our brains are capable of, I immediately realised what had happened. My five-year-old kid had been collected by someone else from his school, and another kid brought to mine.
A thousand scenarios, each riddled with sheer terror, rushed through my mind even as I jumped into my car and tore off as if I was on the circuit at Kyalami. Ghana wasn’t known for crimes like kidnapping. But …
When I got to the school, screaming like a madman, “Where is my child?”, I was told there had been a mistake: a teacher had seen a car, thought it was ours, and called out my kid’s name. He, assuming we had sent the car for him because something was wrong with ours, had got in. He was brought back later, safe and sound.
The horror I felt in the 10 minutes it took me from my house to my kid’s school was played back to me in slow motion when I heard of the killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. What would the 3 000 parents who had children in the school have felt when they heard that a shooting had occurred there and that – as the first news bulletins stated – 25 schoolchildren had been killed?
What do you do when you explode from the office or home to go and stand meekly behind police lines, not knowing whether your beloved Bob or Jennie is alive or dead? The police won’t give you any information, because they have none to give. Yet you are dying for information. “Was Class 6F hit? Oh God! What about 4B?”
My heart goes out to the parents at Columbine. Every parent who had a child there has died a thousand deaths. For even when the siege ends, and your child comes back into your embrace, you cannot forget those moments when you thought you had lost him or her for ever. And however grateful you are that yours is not dead, you ask yourself the spiritually deathly question of why you were spared but not others.
As usual, the United States is trying to work out why and how this latest school massacre could have happened. For it is not the first time by any means. Before Columbine, there was Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. And before Springfield, there was a cacophony of town names which no one outside the US would probably have heard of, except for a sickening outbreak of shootings in schools – Pomona, Paducah, Pearl, Bethel, among others.
Sawn-off shotguns. Tec-9 semi-automatic machine pistols. Hi-point 9mm semi- automatic carbines. Pipe bombs. Grenades. These were the arsenal of a schoolboy aged 17 and another aged 18 who were attending Columbine! Cripes. Where did they get them? In gun shops across America, of course. At “gun shows”. Through mail-order “gun marts” widely advertised not only in gun magazines, but in “regular” publications as well. And, of course, the most deadly source of all these days – on the Internet.
There are an estimated 222-million guns in the US! This we know. But no one can ever count the actual number of guns in the hands of criminals. Many Americans believe that when their Constitution, written just after war against Great Britain, talks about their right to “bear arms”, it means their right as individuals to own deadly weapons. A very wealthy and extremely powerful organisation exists to ensure that this “right” is never curbed by Congress. It is the American Rifle Association, and its president is film star Charlton Heston – “Moses” of the big screen. He is very good at selling the gun to the US.
I honestly hope Heston has grandchildren attending high school. And if he does? Does a film star with an ego as big as Table Mountain care about anything other than himself? Not surprisingly, the industry which made Heston so “visible” is also responsible for a more subtle method of selling guns to the US. You can hardly watch a film these days without being subjected to the most vile, pornographic exhibition of mindless violence. From the battlefields of Rambo to the streetwise adventures of Samuel L Jackson, you have these “glamorous” shootings upon “stupendous” shootings upon “awesome” shootings. And an industry which will sell 30 seconds of airtime for thousands of dollars because the purchasers of those few seconds know they can influence you with it, pretends that when it comes to fictional films the influencing doesn’t work, even among impressionable kids.
That a nation can set itself up to self- destruct by allowing its media to sell screen murder as a demonstration of “freedom of speech” and its shops to sell weapons as a means of defending the citizens” “freedoms” makes you wonder.
Because the modern media know no frontiers, The US’s cowboy culture is pulling many other societies towards similar perdition. Wake up, South Africa. You too are gun happy. Act firmly now, or America’s woes will soon be yours.