August 15 1994

ARTICLE TOOLS

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How did we get to such a state of madness?

"I'm the big man. I got the gun. Why does she have this attitude?"

This was the way a 16-year-old explained killing a mother of three. While Christine Schweiger's 10-year-old daughter watched in horror, two teenagers ordered her to her knees outside a Popeye's Famous Fried Chicken restaurant in Milwaukee and demanded her money. When she said she didn't have any, one of the youths blew away most of her head with a 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun.

Many years ago, Mao Zedong said that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Mao's maxim is true today in America. For many people, especially young African-American and Latino males in this nation's urban communities, their only source of power and self-esteem comes from a gun. But while the power Mao referred to was political, the violent abuse of power that society is currently plagued with is "driven more by greed." So suggests Jesse Jackson: Today's youth, he reminds us, are "not shooting for food and clothes. They're shooting for territory, conquest, gold, diamonds, cars."

In other words, the violence we witness is power with an attitude, as reflected in the reasoning of the teen who killed Christine Schweiger. It is power that blames the victim for not cooperating with its evil intentions. It justifies itself with a cold, conscienceless attitude that believes its victims deserved what they got. It is like the adulteress of Proverbs 30:20, who "eats, and wipes her mouth, and says, 'I have done no wrong.' "

Why is human life regarded in certain sectors of society as having such little value that, on a whim—without provocation—one human being will blow away another, with no remorse whatsoever? Whether the incident is the Rodney ...