REBUILD THE WALL! :

Echoes of America : German school siege reflects U.S. influence. (Sanford Tweedie, Apr. 30, 2002, Philadelphia Inquirer)

As a Fulbright scholar during the 2001-02 school year, I lived in Erfurt, the eastern German city where 16 people were slain inside Gutenberg school Friday. When I heard the news, one of my first thoughts was that it is now clear how much America's influence has pervaded the once-communist former German Democratic Republic. [...]

While living in Erfurt, we awoke one morning to find that our car was stolen. It was recovered by police a few hours later. Riding with the police to the local garage where the car had been towed, I asked one of the officers whom he thought had committed the crime.

"Dumbe Junge," he responded. Stupid boy. He then went on to say that the problem with kids today was a lack of leadership. What he meant was that since the fall of the wall, no one was keeping an eye on the kids; the structured and busy lives forced upon people by the East German government were replaced by nothing; kids had too much time to hang out, see what they didn't have, and imagine the criminal means to get it.

Clearly, he was lamenting that cradle-to-grave care and oversight provided by the GDR had disappeared, that "former times" were over.

Robert Steinhaeuser, the 19-year-old gunman in Friday's shootings, proved that they are. He reportedly told a classmate, "One day, I want everyone to know my name, and I want to be famous." He got his wish. He now becomes the poster child for the new eastern German, one whose memory does not include a time when the e in East was capitalized, who has grown up with the conflicting tenets of western values.

Steinhaeuser's legacy is now the methods he chose to cope with the system's new pressures. We in the West are far too familiar with those pressures--and, alas, those methods.

Mike Daley sent us this astoundingly dim-witted column and one supposes it's possible that both he and I misunderstand it, but it certainly seems to reflect a nostalgia for the kind of totalitarian social control that, while it extinguished freedom, nonetheless offer a heightened degree of physical security (from all evildoers but the state itself, of course). We've frequently argued that all of human history boils down to nothing more than the competing desires for freedom on the one hand and security on the other, but rarely is it illustrated so well as in this frightening ode to bondage. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2002 9:24 AM