March 16, 2000

E-mail a Response

NRA to AIDS: The Blame Game

	Opinion

It was a dark stormy night. Intent on producing a decent column for Cornell's finest newspaper and its excellent readers, I had forgone both sleep and food. After hours of frantic typing one of my roommates kindly ordered a pizza. When it arrived, I told him I'd be there in a seond, eager not to let go of the thought I was typing.

Unfortunately, he had to rush off to make sure that our Hockey team trounced Princeton soundly enough to secure us a spot in the ECAC's, so he scarfed his half and left. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, he left the pizza alone downstairs with Mr. Puppy.

Mr. Puppy is nine years old, but everyone still thinks he's a puppy because he's so damn cute and tiny (he's a miniature dachshund - a "wiener dog") and because he has incredible exuberance. So when I rushed downstairs, hungrier than in all my time since I got off meal plan, I was obviously dismayed to find my dog looking like a boa constrictor after eating a horse, with lumps of pizza visibly protruding from all sides, even from his back.

I was pissed, and I started to try to lecture him, but my words held no meaning for his tilted head. In the end, looking deep into his big puppy eyes, I realized that it really wasn't his fault. He's an animal - an animal enticed by the engulfing aroma of hot delicious pizza! It was part of his very nature to do what he knew only bad dogs did, and eat all the pizza he could find. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and suddenly I realized that it wasn't his fault at all, but rather the fault of his owners for leaving him such saucy temptation.

Mr. Puppy's crime, which he committed by virtue of being a dog, reminded me of so many human scenarios that had been played over in the news recently.

For example, the proliferation of school shootings. The mythology used to be that kids were killed by drug dealers, or psychos that watched from behind playground fences. I, for one, blamed these psychos and drug dealers wholeheartedly, and thought they should all be locked up or shot. This outlook kept my notion of the world stable well into early adulthood.

About two years ago something changed - suddenly we started to have 6-year-old boys killing the girl next to him after a little bit of tension at recess. To say nothing of the incident in Columbine. Like with my dog, I stared into the eyes of that 6-year-old murderer, trying to see the evil lurking inside. And again, I found his expression too blank to find him worthy of any blame. Nonetheless I demanded to know who or what was responsible for this aberration. Is it his parents? Nintendo? Dare we say Satan?

The truth is by trying to place blame, I was doing exactly what the NRA, the Republican Congress, and many of our fellow students wanted me to do. Essentially, they want us to characterize these shootings as individual aberrations, rather than normal human responses to a twisted environment, in which handguns are lying around waiting for kids to pick them up.

The blame gets defused to specific people, instead of the man-made environment that elicits the reflex responses. Harris and Klebold make the cover of Newsweek, because neither the forces of Nature or society would fit.

Another common practice among people like the NRA is to redirect calls to action by re-framing the problem as an insurmountable fact of nature. For example, blacks were denied education for years on the grounds that they were intellectually inferior and could not be taught. Our eyes have historically been averted from scrutinizing problems, simply by reassigning their blame to various scapegoats. White trash, ghetto bastards, illegal immigrants, and Muslim terrorists have all been used towards this end.

We see this mentality overtly when we look at how many of these same people approach welfare. There is a deep-seeded philosophy among many Americans that if you live in a ghetto it is because you are lazy and cannot pull yourself out - that it is some shortcoming of the particular individual's nature. What they fail to realize is that almost any human being, if placed in comparable surroundings, would express similar dysfunctionality. We would be those drug pushers that we so revile, if it became such a desperate matter of survival.

Most Americans continue to see these problems as symptoms of individual weakness, instead of normal human responses to specific environmental pressures. The result of this is tremendously less pressure to do anything about it - people are left hanging because, "it's their own damn fault."

Adequate measures are not taken to save the inner cities from crack. We are prevented from noticing certain trends, such as the disproportionate amount of liquor ads targeting poor blacks. The ignorance simply destroys the impetus to find solutions.

This is precisely what occurred during the spread of the HIV virus, when it was characterized as a "gay disease." How many lives were lost as a result of our refusal to recognize it as an affliction of more than a subset of humanity?

The problem is this: we are stuck with certain aspects of our man-made environment, from urban sprawl to limited resources. And we are bound to certain aspects of human behavior, which cannot be unwired unless you embrace eugenics, thought control, or a similar technological nightmare.

It is human nature to drive at unsafe speeds, so we set speed limits. It is human nature to favor ourselves over others, so we erect traffic lights. Few people protest such regulatory measures because we all recognize our culpability in the potential problems the laws try to prevent.

But in so many problems, we fail to recognize our accountability, because we are made to believe that someone else is responsible - that regulation is somebody else's problem.

Is Brazil cutting down the rain forest, or is our global economy? Is North Korea building nuclear weapons just to be evil Communists, or are there more intricate international dynamics in effect?

The first step is to acknowledge our universal accountability - only then can we have universal action. Like it or not, we are going to need this sort of regulation more and more. While human nature will stay the same, our environment will be changing rapidly, due to some crazy new technologies and ideas that our psyches aren't necessarily ready for. Shootings in the classroom, and the rise of the ghetto in modern cities are recent examples of this phenomenon beginning. To maintain control, and keep from all going insane, we need structures in place to meet these challenges.

At the same time, we must filter out the voices that distract the thinking members of society with rhetorical assuasions that these are problems of another country, another race, or another class. The "we were chosen" mentality that pervades this country is altogether unsettling, both locally and globally speaking.

So a week later, Mr. Puppy scarfed down another pizza - this time a deep dish from The Nines. All of the time I had told him what a bad dog he was didn't amount to much in the end. I should have just kept the pizza out of his reach, because dogs will be dogs.

Nathan Wilson is a graduate student in the College of Engineering. The North Façade appears every Monday.