Society Abandons Nathaniel Brazill
By Robert Steinback
Originally published in The Miami Herald, May 9, 2001
I haven't been able to shake the feeling, while following coverage of 14-year-old Nathaniel Brazill's murder trial, that society, finally, is off the hook for what's wrong in society.
Not long ago, society—meaning the people of our communities and nation and our collective attitudes and values—would have felt compelled to examine its own role in the boy's shooting of teacher Barry Grunow.
Young Nathaniel did, after all, spring from our midst. Don't we have an obligation to examine the reality we've created, to search for clues to explain why a 13-year-old would react to a minor setback—being sent home from school for misbehaving—by carrying a loaded gun back to school and pointing it at the face of a teacher he admired?
No longer, it seems.
We created this screwed up, confused, frightened little boy, just as surely as we've created—and proudly taken vicarious credit for—the scientists, entrepreneurs and artists America has produced.
But we don't want Nathaniel Brazill on our balance sheet of conscience. So we've cut him loose to bear the murder charge alone.
How cowardly. When something good arises from our society, we are America, the proud nation of values. Yet when the same cauldron spews forth something bad, we point an accusing finger at the individual and exonerate ourselves, saying America had nothing to do with it.
I hear so little outrage, despair or even angst that yet another child faces life in prison. No political or civic figures have spoken up, except those who endorse such barbarity in the name of justice. There's scarcely a debate at all.
The bully pulpit is vacant.
This subtle but relentless philosophical shift away from society bearing any responsibility for its citizens' actions has intensified during the last quarter century.
As I see it, America has been exhausted by guilt. The Depression forced society to take responsibility for poverty and economic injustice. The civil rights and feminist movements forced society to admit to generations of institutionalized racism and sexism.
The list grew: We were told our society was to blame for homelessness, crime, the untreated mentally ill, the abandoned elderly, drug abuse, homophobia, on and on.
America made considerable social reforms in the latter part of the 20th Century. But rather than this progress being a source of national pride, it morphed into resentment.
Overuse of the guilt card by political liberals opened the door for conservatives to stoke this resentment. Progress by distressed segments of society increasingly was depicted as coming at the expense of more deserving and productive segments.
Criminally inclined kids became the exclusive fault of parents, not society. The question of institutional sexism and racism became women and people of color looking for undeserved privilege. Homophobia turned into the godlessness of gays.
Mental illness became a family matter if it was recognized at all. Poverty and homelessness was reduced to people who "didn't want'' to work.
Today, our society won't even admit a role in the transgressions of its own children: We ludicrously assign adult responsibility, judgment and will to a 14-year-old.
I'm not exonerating the individual from self-responsibility for bad behavior or bad circumstances; far from it. Ascribing responsibility to society never removes it from the individual; it only helps us in the search for justice and solutions.
Nathaniel Brazill must be disciplined for his actions—but not as an adult. The only reason he is being prosecuted as one is that we, as a society, have become too cowardly to admit that children are shaped primarily by the world we create for them.
