Lawrence Auster
Tuesday, March 27, 2001

Her story, broadcast on a recent edition of ABC's 20/20, concerned yet another threatened school slaughter in Middle America. When a male friend confided to her that he was thinking of shooting some of their classmates, she told no one about it. It was only after he began to talk about killing her along with others that she informed on him, which led to his arrest and judicial confinement at his parents' home. Asked by 20/20's Connie Chung why she had initially remained silent about a possible massacre of her fellow students, she replied: "I didn't like them. I didn't care if he killed them."

Her matter-of-fact tone and expressionless eyes, as much as her chilling words, said it all: It wasn't that she hated her friend's prospective victims or had some special urge to see them killed; it was that she didn't care if they were killed, and she wasn't embarrassed to let the world know it.

This came as something of a shock. Even as we have witnessed the overturning of so many ethical norms that once constituted our society, most of us probably still assumed that there was at least one rock-bottom value that no one in America would deny, at least in public: that murder – especially the wanton murder of one's neighbors – is wrong. When an ordinary young American flatly rejects that belief, we are forced to acknowledge that we really are no longer living in the world we once knew.

The casual denial of what used to be an unquestioned moral conviction shared by everyone may also lead us to examine the grounds for that conviction in ourselves. Looking within, we see that our belief in the inviolability of each human life is not imparted to us automatically; nor does it come through our senses or our feelings or our self-interested reason. It is a transcendent truth, a revelation in consciousness that is not derived directly from the facts of experience. While grasped inwardly, it is also reinforced, as all morality must be for flawed humanity, by society's uncompromising insistence that certain things are absolutely forbidden.

When a society loses its adherence to transcendent truth and the will to enforce truth-based standards, a radically different kind of "truth" appears on the scene to take the place of the old, along with a radically different type of human being to represent it. That is the revelation in reverse that the dead-eyed girl from Colorado has given us. It is the revelation of nihilism, the denial of any inherent morality in existence.

What we need to understand, however, is that the nihilism manifested in the acceptance of mass murder is only a more advanced stage of the nihilism that is an established part of our mainstream culture and politics.

Two days after the Colorado story aired on 20/20, Democratic Senator John Edwards of North Carolina appeared on Meet the Press, where Tim Russert asked him what he thought about President Clinton's astounding abuses of his presidential pardon power. Edwards replied: "I've been travelling around my state talking to literally hundreds of people, Tim, and not one of them raised the issue of these pardons. They're concerned about health care, social security, jobs," etc., etc.

This sort of remark became so familiar during the Clinton years that we might fail to grasp its true significance. What Edwards was indicating, as a routine fact of political life, was that the American people have no civic virtues anymore, and, moreover, that they should not be expected to have any. As far as our public life is concerned, all that people care about – and all they should care about, according to Edwards – are the material goods and services that government provides them. Going beyond the Lewinsky-era excuse that we should ignore President Clinton's depraved behavior in office because it was "only private," Edwards was now claiming that we should even ignore Clinton's massive defilement of the most sacred official power of the presidency. Without fanfare, Edwards thus affirmed a new norm – a nihilistic norm – of American politics.

Ironically, Edwards embraced this nihilistic view in the immediate aftermath of the Santee, California, school attack, when the whole liberal establishment was asking for the umpteenth time why middle-class teens were killing each other. It did not seem to occur to Edwards or any of his fellow Democrats that there might be some connection between a political morality that says, "We will permit our leaders to do anything they want so long as they attend to our material needs," and a personal morality that says, "I don't have to prevent a person from committing mass murder so long as he's not hurting me." Thus, the liberal politicians and the media kept grasping for an explanation, while the empty-eyed high school student from Colorado had already given them one.

As for President Bush, his consistent refusal to expose the transgressions in high places that have ruined our nation's character makes him a party to that ruin. While infinitely preferable to Clintonite sleaze, of course, mere "W"-style decency cannot restore our moral health as a society. Following years of massive lies and the massive toleration of those lies, what is needed above all is that we speak the truth. And speaking the truth requires us to be dividers as well as uniters.

Before the Clinton era (how long ago that now seems), most Americans seemed to take it for granted that there were more important things in life than material goods and conveniences. As the sardonic liberal joke used to put it, in Mussolini's fascist Italy "the trains ran on time." But now, in one of the saddest reversals in history, liberals have adopted the very rationale for fascism that they used to mock. By their own admission, all they care about is whether the trains run on time, even as they claim to be perplexed by the increasingly routinized scourge of youth violence.

When our political leaders see morality and honesty in government as a matter of indifference, is it really so surprising that young people see the murder of their schoolmates as a matter of indifference?

Lawrence Auster lives in New York City. He can be reached through e-mail at lawrence.auster@att.net.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Clinton Scandals
Pardongate

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