Perspective, Not Paranoia, Is Needed on Campuses

Eighteen-year-old Vaclav Vanek says he was tempted to let it slide. After all, he’s about to graduate from Aliso Niguel High School, and these aren’t exactly the best of times for teens to be asking for some slack.

Yet he picked up the phone and called. What I heard on the line was a teenager asking for the near-impossible: that we adults stay calm at a time when our national sense of equilibrium has been shattered.

“It’s just the fact that schools are trying to scapegoat certain types of students that are causing this,” he says, referring to the recent spate of violence in American schools. “Which is really wrong.”

What’s wrong, Vanek says, is that school officials are overreacting, and they may end up making matters worse.

This young man admits to having a personal stake in the issue. His younger brother is in trouble at the same school for writing a letter about a teacher that, perhaps in a long-ago era, would have been dismissed as youthful anger or frustration. In today’s climate, the implied threat was too serious to ignore.

Vanek, who spoke to me with his mother’s approval, says his brother “was a little bit extreme” in his letter but was just frustrated because of ongoing problems with the teacher. His brother now may be expelled, he says.

I don’t know all the details of his brother’s case, but that’s not really what Vanek was calling about. His broader concern is about the dangers of overreaction, about stereotyping and censorship. He worries, for example, about school officials across the country who have banned trench coats in response to the killings in Littleton, Colo.

“This whole trench coat thing,” he says. “A lot of kids wear trench coats. It’s style, it’s fashion. The shooting that happened [Thursday in a suburban Atlanta school] was a kid with baggy pants.” Not to mention, Vanek says, that the boy was later identified as a churchgoer who also had taken part in Boy Scouts.

“Which shows you it’s not just people wearing black or trench coats,” he says. “Anyone is capable of doing it. We shouldn’t be singling out and alienating people who already feel alienated as it is.”

The catalyst for the increased tension was last month’s mass murders inside Columbine High School in Littleton. I ask Vanek if that, plus other publicized school shootings, has changed campus life. After all, most of the fatalities from the shootings have been students.

“The only thing that’s really changed is that officials tend to be a lot more paranoid. Littleton really hit close to home, because it’s a suburban area much like our own.”

That’s why he knows he may be asking for a lot when he implores adults to maintain perspective with teens. “We want to live normal lives,” he says. “We realize there are nut cases everywhere, but we can’t do anything about it. You can’t let a few bad apples ruin the whole batch.”

Vanek says his musical tastes are similar to those of the two Littleton teens who went on the killing rampage. But music isn’t the reason they killed, he says. “A neo-Nazi who listens to classical music will not be less violent than one who listens to Marilyn Manson,” he says.

While we talk, an idea kicks around in my head. Couldn’t other teens do a better job, I ask Vanek, of alerting adults to potential troublemakers? For example, a tip from a student in Anaheim ultimately led to the arrest last week of two eighth-graders who had amassed a potentially lethal arsenal at their homes.

“That would definitely be more logical than adults making assumptions,” Vanek says, “because they really don’t live the same lives as students. They don’t see the same things that go on.”

But would teens turn in other teens? Could teens, in point of fact, spot the potentially dangerous members in their midst?

“It’s really hard to say,” Vanek says, “but it’s not like one person or one type of person. You really can’t stereotype violence. It’s not pinpointable. A lot of kids have frustration and anger, especially toward school. A lot of them say things, and you can’t take it seriously.”

The difficulty, he concedes, is determining which ones are just venting and which ones are potential threats.

These days, the tides are running against giving teens a break. In a bygone era, adults simply said they didn’t understand them. Now, it’s as if they’re fearful of them.

I couldn’t give Vanek any uplifting predictions that school officials will loosen the screws any time soon. Their own protective instincts aside, they’re under pressure from parents to keep schools safe. It’s the classic condition for overreaction.

From my bleacher seat, I wonder if moments of perceived crisis like this can’t lead to better ideas.

As he departs the ivied halls of Aliso Niguel High, Vanek is on to something, I think.

I think he understands why adults are uptight. We’re frightened by the violence, because it seems unpredictable and unstoppable.

What I also heard, though, is his suggestion that at a moment in our history like this, answers come not in creating more natural barriers between adults and teens but in trying to tear them down.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers can reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.