The Myth of Sylvan Innocence

When we were kids, we had a cousin who lived in the city, and she’d bring her friends down to visit in the summertime. They were hippies, and they’d tell us how lucky we were to be children in “the heartland.” We’d nod politely. We thought they were out of their minds.

The heartland. What was that? A simple, kindly place, they figured. A place as innocent as, say, the heart of a child. We were not innocent. Parochial and barefoot, yep, but innocent, hardly. The small towns and backwoods of this country never have been as gentle as city people like to imagine. Our corner of the heartland seemed a magnet for souls who couldn’t handle the world unless they hid out somewhere in the wild.

We knew them by their children. There was the girl in our first grade who, for show and tell, stripped to her slip the way her stepdad had taught her to do. There was the family who lived in a shanty at the bottom of an abandoned strip mine pit whose sons would boast about the way they tortured dogs. There was the boy who thought about bringing his hunting rifle to school to shoot the girl who’d rejected him, then, thankfully, changed his mind. This is not for shock value, only context. These troubled folks were a minority, but there were enough of them to persuade you that cities didn’t have the market cornered on violence.

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On Thursday, the dark side of childhood in the heartland reared its much-underreported head. In a small, overcast town in Oregon, a teenager with a gun fixation and a serious emotional problem walked into his high school and opened fire. The act was shocking, vicious, crazy--and yet, so common that, from a distance, it felt like something out of a script. And in fact, it was a cliche of a tragic sort, the eighth schoolyard massacre in this country in five years.

There was plenty you could draw from a tragedy like that. You could point to the semiautomatic rifle and the two handguns this kid was carrying and note the obscene lengths to which this nation’s parents have rolled over for the gun lobby. You could wonder what it will take for us to get over our national addiction to rage. You could ask why no one took this kid seriously when he said he wanted to kill people. You could point to the makers of movies and TV shows and video games, whose reliance on violence as a hook approaches the level of pornography.

And you could note, as many commentators did, that all these massacres have occurred, not in the wicked cities, but in little towns with names like Springfield and Jonesboro and Amityville that are all the rage for people fed up with city life. Implicit would be the surprise that such a thing would occur among children in small-town America. As if hostility and hurt feelings were the special purview of adult city dwellers; as if the gun problem was the special purview of the urban poor.

In fact, it takes a lot of strength to live in a city, the kind of strength that the weakest in a society tend not to have. It is on the outskirts, the fringes, that vulnerability is left to fester, is covered up with pastoral myth.

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When we were kids, there was a boy who lived in a trailer, all by himself with his dad. He was a thin boy and quiet, with a dirty face and a crew cut. Every night on the bus, he’d have cuss-word contests with his friends.

When they weren’t cussing, they were talking about firearms, and how well they could shoot, and how they would shoot to kill. One day the boy had a fight with his father. He took his gun. He came down to the bus stop with it, waved it around, went up over a hill.

We thought he was kidding. We were working-class kids in the heartland. Like those kids in Oregon on Thursday, we thought it was all an act. That night, they found the boy’s body in a woodland clearing, under a red oak tree. He’d fired into the air until he was down to his last bullet, then shot himself.

This was many years ago, and you could note that now a kid like that might get all sorts of inspiration from video games and movies and TV. There are all sorts of options now for kids who feel weak and violent, a world of lethal possibilities.

Those possibilities will fly right by the minds of the kids who are strong, the kids with the sophistication not to take them seriously. For the rest, the minority, it will be another matter, whether they’re in the heartland or next door to you and me.

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.