Images Too Close for Comfort

It can’t happen here.

These days, the once-familiar phrase is used mainly with an ironic smirk. Thankfully, I didn’t hear it at all as Tuesday’s grim drama in Colorado played across TV screens throughout Ventura County.

Students with quavering voices and terror in their eyes spoke of executioners stalking through the school library. Anguished parents wanted to know if their children had escaped, or had been evacuated, or had been cut down by gunfire, or were still trapped inside the charnel house. Their torture was as real as anything from Kosovo.

It can happen here.

That was what they were saying as the images of pain filled the TV screen in Macy’s employee break room.

“Anything can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Daniel Tuando, a 20-year-old cologne salesman. “You can’t check everyone in school.”

Juan Naranjo, his friend and fellow Channel Islands High School graduate, echoed that sad truth.

“It’s just something that happens,” said Naranjo, an 18-year-old stock clerk who wants to become a police officer. “You just never know when or where.”

I thought helplessly of my daughter Kate, who’s in high school now. I can’t protect her from the stresses of growing up. I certainly can’t shield her from lunatics with lethal grudges.

In Ventura County, school officials on Tuesday said reassuring things. We have programs in place. We teach conflict-resolution, peer mediation, character, values, decision-making. We enforce our dress codes.

But the TV in the Ventura school district headquarters’ board room was tuned to the carnage of the day, and, as somber employees drifted in and out, Supt. Joseph Spirito watched and thought: What if?

“You always say to yourself, God forbid, what if it happened here? My good Lord, what would I do--how would I handle this?” Spirito isn’t big on metal detectors or more police in the hallways or, as he put it, “anti-aircraft guns on campus.” Instead, he wants more educational programs, more instruction in the spirit and practice of tolerance, more emphasis on simply getting along.

To me, it sounds well-intended, squishy, ineffectual. But a couple of young guys taking a break at Skate Street, Ventura’s indoor skateboarding palace, came up with much the same idea.

Josh Feldman, a 1996 Buena High School graduate, pointed to the razor-sharp divisions of the high school caste system and spoke of “pent-up aggression.”

“You’re taught about what happened to the Jews and the blacks, but you’re not taught about the jocks [coming down] on the punk rockers and the Goths every day of their lives.”

Chris “Thor” McMakin agreed. “Things are getting bad, man,” he said. “It makes me think of the people I made fun of at school. Maybe they’ll want to come back at me now.”

In the days and weeks to come, we’ll hear plenty about the boys of Littleton. Maybe there will be the usual tidy explanations: guns as close as the family closet, meanness as close as the TV.

Or maybe we’ll learn about a monstrous pathology that nobody in the family--perhaps the nicest of families--ever wanted to deal with.

Who knows?

For now, we can only shudder, and conclude: It can happen here.

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@aol.com.

* MAIN COVERAGE: Colorado high school attack stuns nation. A1