Spurned advances spark Texas shooting

     If only Shana Fisher had said yes. This is the implication of countless headlines following Dimitrios Pagourtzis’ decision to slaughter her along with nine of her teachers and classmates.  According to a Facebook post by Fisher’s mother, Fisher “had four months of problems from this boy” where “he kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no. He continued to get more aggressive”. So a girl endures several months of harassment, until her harasser kills her. How are we supposed to see this?

     The headlines say it all: “Spurned advances spark Texas shooting.” “Texas school shooter ‘killed girl who turned down his advances’.” “Spurned advances provoked incident at Santa Fe high school.”  The message, in case you’ve missed it, is that Fisher’s rejection – her “spurning” – of Pagourtzis is what caused his murderous rampage.  There’s something truly depressing about finding the world view of a killer reflected in the reporting of his crimes. Then again, belief that women and girls exist to tend to the sexual and emotional needs of men and boys is everywhere.

It’s there in every romantic comedy and pop song that recasts male stalking and harassment as the plucky determination of the underdog. It’s there in every parenting manual which tells mothers that boys require more attention than girls. It’s there every time we lecture girls on how much harder boys find it to express their feelings without using their fists.  It’s there in our very concepts of manhood, masculinity and male pride. Men and boys, we are told, have something precious to lose whenever a woman says no. There’s no comparable concept of female pride. Girls who feel ugly, who are mocked for their appearance, who don’t get the boy they desire – the vast majority of us, that is – are simply expected to suck it up.   There has to be a fundamental change in how our sons conceptualise their place in the world.   The implication is that if only the parents of the eventual shooter had taught that all important life lesson that you will be rejected by a girl one day and that's the way the cookie crumbles.  There isn't a guy alive that hasn't been rejected by a girl, or a guy who was once alive. 

     A week before the shooting, Fisher embarrassed him in front of others in a class by standing up and telling Pagourtzis that she wouldn't go out with him.  This seems to be the final straw that caused him to snap.  Even if Pagourtzis decided to carry out this tragic act of violence because Shana Fisher turned him down and embarrassed him, the shooting didn't happen because of Shana Fisher. The shooting happened because of the shooter. Sure she may have had a 'right' to embarrass him in class. Still, had she not, she would still be alive.  And this is a very key point, that gets over looked and swept away.  What does it say about our society that kids think the response to frustration over being rebuffed by a female student or embarrassed in front of others is sufficient cause to shoot a bunch of kids to death?  I think one of the main problems here is the kids who are not taught how to deal with rejection or failure; therefore, when it happens, the only possible reaction, in their minds, is revenge... "getting even" with whoever rejected you or caused you to fail... In extreme cases, this could even extend to "eliminating" anyone who witnessed an event that resulted in the kid feeling shamed, humiliated or rejected.  Everyone will jump on to ''she had the right to do anything'' and ''he should just suck it up''; but how toxic is that line of thought?  It's normal and desirable, I think, for parents to want their kids to grow up happy and successful, but the kids ALSO need to learn and understand that not everything in life will be "fair"; that they won't always succeed at everything they try...and that they will not necessarily be loved, or even liked, by every other person in the world.




     If it is true that for months the alleged shooter was harassing a fellow student, and that his harassment was escalating in severity, we need to ask WHY the school did not take action under Title IX's requirement to maintain schools free of gender discrimination and keeping schools safe from gender violence.  I can only hope that schools look closely at this case and start understanding why sexual harassment can create climates that are unsafe for our children -- and why they need to take these incidents seriously. We need to do more to devote resources and training on sexual harassment and assault at Pk-12. It is part of addressing this multifaceted tragedy of violence in our schools.  The sad truth is that schools, the community and people just don't want to do anything that will take time, effort and most of all money.


    Some 4,400 adolescents commit suicide each year from being bullied. The underlying issue for then is mental health and guidance about norms during the adolescent maturation process. While some of these massacres are clearly by psychopaths (e.g. Las Vegas), most of them are by men left to their own devices to understand the landscape of the norms of interpersonal boundaries. A great deal of the adolescent period of life is about learning boundaries, understanding them with respect to awakening human sexuality, androgens and estrogen, and limits on interpersonal dominance (that bullying), how to deal with rejection, pride, menace, esteem and self-respect, when to stand your ground and when to ask for help, dealing with failure and success: basic socialization and mental health. We are social animals and children are not born with some innate understanding of this as they encounter it, or better said this monster reacted to it in a way a child would by acting out but with lethal weapons. Behold the apparent narcissism of a neglected generation. It is as much a part of the adolescent learning process as anything else taught in school, we just address our lame management of it later with revenge fantasy movies like Mean Girls and Revenge of the Nerds, something that actually encourages this.

    The idea of parochial schools is an attempt to address these two learning experiences, academics and normative values, or religion or scouting, many families simply do not supply them (or even have them). I would say that we need a non-secular course like this in public schools but this both crosses the line into parental rights (to inculcate their own values into their children, separation of church and state), and I am also quite confident the teaching of them would be poached by politicos to also teach their own subjective values with the official stamp of academic objectivity.

    We have to supply this education to children somehow though or this carnage will continue. Surely we can all agree on some basic set of norms about mental health and interpersonal boundaries, perhaps a selection of courses selected the parents, even provided by non-school organizations such as churches or more non-religious philosophical groups of their preference, the only requirement being that one of them be selected and completed. Hey people: we are primates, a sexual species with dominance hierarchies and like it or not no amount of political ideals will change that, get it? As we grow it takes guidance as children become adults or it is Lord of the Flies. Adolescents need this education to become socialized and self-actualizing as surely as they need to learn to read and write.

The Soda Tax

    

     When Seattle's soda tax passed in July of last year, its proponents promised that it would accomplish all good things.  Tacking on just 1.75 cents per ounce to sweetened beverages, said then mayor Ed Murray would not only encourage healthier consumption habits, but also generate enough revenue to subsidize trips to the farmers market, to pay for free community college, and even to roll back "white-privileged, institutional racism."  On January 1, the tax went into full-effect, and while all those vaunted progressive goals no doubt are just over the horizon, Seattle shoppers are starting to see a more immediate effect of the tax: massive price increases.  The cost of a typical can of coke is now 20 cents higher. That adds up fast: A typical 36-can case of soft drink is now $7.56 more expensive, nearly doubling the price at many retail outlets. Stores are only too willing to let customers know who is responsible for the cost increases.  Local Seattle press and social media have been filled with images of Costco price tags that now bear a "City of Seattle Sweetened Beverage Recovery Fee" to make up for the new tax, along with an inscription that reads "this item is also available at our Tukwila and Shoreline locations without the City of Seattle Beverage Tax.

   So far Seattle is sticking by its soda tax, which it is counting on to bring in $15 million in its first year. That revenue is intended to pay for a grab bag of progressive goodies, including more educational services, $2 million for subsidies to farmers market shoppers, $1.4 million in community college tuition assistance, and $500,000 to retrain beverage industry workers who lose their jobs.  But a soda tax is a micro solution to a macro problem. The purveyance of teaspoon remedies is a hallmark of Clinton/Obama public policy (with some notable exceptions), and soda taxes are essentially neoliberalism at the municipal level: small-scale solutions to large problems relying on undependable market mechanisms. Is whatever revenue they provide really going to solve the enormous disinvestment in black and brown communities?

     But the real knock on the soda tax is that the conversation it generates—the policy oxygen it consumes—far exceeds its relevance to the oppression of people of color in local communities.  Soda taxation is a very meager substitute for a serious discussion of urban policy, or of economic policy responses to institutional racism. If our concern is revenue for local governments, we need to talk about federal and state aid, financed by broad-based taxes. If our concern is public health, imagine how low-income communities would benefit from an expanded network of community health clinics, as has been proposed by Bernie Sanders and James Clyburn. Or consider the changes in behavior—including consumption of sugar drinks—that follow from reductions in inequality and increases in living standards. When people have more money to spend, healthier food becomes more accessible.

  All income brackets and races/ethnicities in the U.S. self-report consuming approximately the same amounts and types of calories, with middle-income people frequenting fast food establishments the most. Even if, on average, lower income people consume more soda, I question this narrow framing of sugar intake. Surely artisanal, small-batch cider or ice cream (or craft soda!) also contain excess sugar, but no public campaign surveils and shames foodies for their bespoke drinks and desserts.
The idea that somebody’s diet should be policed simply because she has less money in her wallet, or more weight on her body, is highly problematic. Soda tax campaigns almost always conflate weight and health, invoking the so-called obesity epidemic as if heavy necessarily means unhealthy. They also tend to conflate race and class, claiming to be especially concerned for (read: rescuing) people of color, as if being Black or Brown necessarily means “needing help from above.”

     Stigmatizing and taxing people for drinking soda both distracts from the (far worse) industrial production of toxic exposures and alienates potential allies in the paramount battle against the real threat: corporate power. (After all, if everyone simply switches from Coke to Dasani, Coca-Cola Co. still wins, and people and the planet still lose.) We cannot spare our precious time and resources on soda taxes—of all things!—when living wages, affordable healthcare, and safe and clean workplaces, homes and neighborhoods are far more urgent concerns. Public health advocates should refocus their energies on stronger corporate regulations, relieving the downward pressure on wages, prohibiting offshore tax havens and preventing chemical intoxication of our environments, among other issues.
Promoting public health means supporting all people’s right to prepare pleasurable meals on their own terms, which requires reining in the corporations that are corrupting our government, poisoning our planet and quite seriously threatening our lives.