Singular Blog

Federal Shutdown/"The Wichita Divide"

Stephen Singular — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:06:41 GMT

In 1987 I published my first book, Talked to Death, about the life and murder of Denver talk show host, Alan Berg. The Oliver Stone movie, “Talk Radio,” is based in part on this book. That story described how nine, obviously-fanatical neo-Nazis plotted to kill Berg and launch a white power revolution, designed to rid America of minorities. For the past decade, I’ve wanted to revisit this subject because highly disturbing pieces of the mindset -- the anger, fear, blame, hatred, and absolutist thinking -- of those who assassinated Berg have gradually crept from the fringes of our society into the American mainstream. They’ve become normalized inside major religions, the corporate media, and political leaders at the highest levels of our society. They are at the root of what all but shut down our federal government on the night of April 8, 2011, when the anti-abortionists were willing to sacrifice the jobs of 800,000 employees because they don’t accept what has been settled law in the United States since 1973. Their religious ideology trumps the rule of law -- the very definition of extremism.

On May 31, 2009, when abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down by Scott Roeder inside his Kansas church, I began researching my 20^th book. The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion, will be published this coming week. It’s about the new American civil war that’s infected our country for roughly the past four decades. It’s about how deeply personal issues, especially sexual issues like reproduction, have been used to demonize entire segments of the population, and how this has been driven by some of the most successful people in our culture.

The book’s narrative focuses on the lives of two families, Dr. Tiller’s and Scott Roeder’s, and describes how both were trapped inside this war and experienced their own tragedies. I’ve tried to show the heart and the cost of this conflict, mostly through the eyes of Roeder’s ex-wife, Lindsey, who found out first-hand what it’s like to marry a relatively “normal” man and watch him turn into an American terrorist.

When people at the very top of society sanction hatred in a public way, it filters down to those not only less fortunate, but sometimes to those who are emotionally unstable. Then violence becomes not just likely, but virtually predictable. And then, when it’s too late, the haters claim they had nothing to do with the bloodshed and run for the hills. Whether we want to be or not, we’re all involved in this war and we’re all responsible for what we bring to it. This is a fight for the soul of the nation, just as the first Civil War was. We can’t afford to lose the sense of co-operation and balance that have kept America alive, and kept religion and politics separate, throughout more than two centuries. We are perilously close to the edge.

Is President Obama Listening to Wyoming?

Stephen Singular — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 23:28:55 GMT

In recent months, a profound thing has unfolded in Wyoming. Two women in the state legislature – Sue Wallis and Lisa Shepperson, a pair of “small government” conservative Republicans -- stood up in that chamber and spoke from the heart about abortion, about their own medical experience, and about how no state or federal government belongs in this part of their lives, or anyone’s life. Their remarks came as many other GOP politicians across the nation (let’s call them “Big Government” Republicans) launched a coast-to-coast battle to make abortion laws more restrictive.

In 2010, state legislatures introduced more than 600 measures to limit access to abortion and 34 of those bills passed. Last year’s mid-term elections saw 45 new anti-abortionists win seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Twenty-nine governors are now strongly anti-abortion, eight more than before the last election. Fifteen states currently have both anti-abortion legislatures and governors, up five from last year. Many of the newly-elected politicians support laws that require doctors to read fetal development material to their abortion patients, to show them ultrasound images, and to impose mandatory waiting periods. They are also intent on killing Planned Parenthood, which offers 1.85 million low-income women family-planning counseling and screening for sexually-transmitted diseases, diabetes, and a variety of cancers; no other nationwide outfit in America offers this level of comprehensive care to women.

According to Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pennsylvania), the U.S. House is “more pro-life than it’s ever been.”

“We are sending a clear message to House Republicans that their agenda on women’s health is extreme,” says Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California). “It breaks faith with a decades-long bipartisan compromise, and it risks the health and lives of women.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has called the latest round of anti-abortion activities the biggest assault women’s rights “in our lifetime.”

So how strange is it that the deepest rebellion against this assault has come from Wyoming, America’s reddest state? Its Senate holds 26 Republicans and only four Democrats, but Wallis and Shepperson did not pay any attention to these numbers. They stood nakedly in front of their colleagues and spoke passionately about what freedom means and what privacy is, but that isn’t the really profound part. Their fellow legislators, along with other citizens around the state, heard them and began responding in an open and empathetic manner. They women found out they weren’t alone, not even in Wyoming, in their wanting our government to be about creating jobs and balancing budgets, rather than intruding on the most personal aspects of American lives. To their amazement, they found allies on every side.

Because of their efforts, Wyoming defeated a bill requiring doctors to inform women seeking abortions of their right to see an ultrasound image, and providing them with scientifically-disputed information about fetal pain. Once this initial bill had been stopped, its original sponsor came back with another, slightly changed one, and again Wallis and Shepperson fought back. The second bill made it to the Senate floor, where it failed by one vote: 15-14, with one member not present. The battle to limit women’s rights in Wyoming was over, at least for another year.

Something happens when people who are speaking in public about important subjects drop their script and begin to talk from a deeper place. This is not only heard in a different way, but also felt differently. It becomes virtually irresistible and unstoppable in its force and effect.

When President Obama first emerged as a candidate for the Oval Office this was how he spoke about America and the reason he gave so much hope to so many. That’s why people responded to him and bought in when he talked about creating change we can believe in. But he hasn’t done this as President or spoken from the heart ending about the wars America remains entangled in or lowering the crushing medical costs that his health care reform have done virtually nothing to address. He hasn’t trusted us to be able to hear and accept adult common sense or asked us to make sacrifices because that’s the right thing to do. Maybe he can learn something important from what these two women did in Wyoming -- that he has allies out there, tens of millions of them who are craving leadership and a change of direction for America. Sometimes, you have a take a chance that there’s a net where none appears to be. Sometimes, you have to realize you’re not alone and that others believe in you perhaps more than you believed in yourself. Wallis and Shepperson have shown us the way forward. Now the rest of us need to stand up and speak out.

The Growing Battle Against Women’s Rights & Abortion

Stephen Singular — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 16:54:37 GMT

If you were the kind of person who believed in conspiracies, you might see the outlines of one in what follows. On May 31, 2009, the radical Kansas anti-abortionist Scott Roeder walked into Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita and gunned down George Tiller in the foyer, just as the Sunday service was about to start. Dr. Tiller was America’s best-known and most-hated abortion provider (my book about his assassination and the unfolding civil war in our country over issues like abortion, The Wichita Divide, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2011). In the immediate aftermath of the murder anti-abortion groups, politicians, and individuals rushed forward, as they always do in these circumstances, and decried this violent act. No one wanted to say that by killing Dr. Tiller, Roeder had eliminated abortion not just in Wichita and Kansas, but had removed this option for the thousands of women who’d come to his clinic from other states seeking his advice and care. Roeder had effectively lowered the number of abortions in a wide swath of the country. Other people, rarely described as “radical,” were about to intensify their own strategies for accomplishing the same goal -- from coast to coast.

In 2010, state legislatures introduced more than 600 measures to limit access to abortion and 34 of them passed. Last year’s mid-term elections saw 45 new anti-abortionists win seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Twenty-nine governors are now strongly anti-abortion, eight more than before the last election. Fifteen states currently have both anti-abortion legislatures and governors, up five from last year. Many of the newly-victorious politicians support laws that require doctors to read material to their abortion patients about fetal development, to show them ultrasound images, and to impose mandatory waiting periods. According to Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pennsylvania), the House is “more pro-life than it’s ever been.”

The Republican majority in the House is considering the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” which would abolish tax breaks for private employers who provide health coverage offering abortion services. Many, if not a majority, of employer-sponsored insurance plans do just this. Under the proposed bill, people with their own policies and enough expenses to claim an income tax deduction could not deduct either the premiums for policies that cover abortion or the cost of an abortion. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Christopher Smith (R-New Jersey), would provide federal financing of abortions in cases of “forcible” rape, but not statutory or coerced rape or incest involving those who are not minors. Smith’s office has not yet defined what “forcible rape” actually means.

Another new bill, the “Protect Life Act” sponsored by Rep. Pitts, would prohibit Americans receiving insurance through the new state exchanges from purchasing abortion coverage, even with their own money. And it would allow hospitals to refuse women abortions, including in emergencies, if such care offended the conscience of the health care providers. Many of those behind this new anti-abortion legislation have run for office or positioned themselves as Small Government Conservatives. Yet when it comes to abortion, they’re all in favor of expanding the feds’ role in the most private area of individual lives.

The current U.S. Supreme Court precedent prevents the government from barring abortions prior to the point of “viability”: around 22 to 26 weeks after conception. Last year, Nebraska enacted a law changing this standard and the state now bans abortions 20 weeks after conception. The statute includes a very narrow exception for preserving a woman’s physical health or life, but not for severe fetal anomalies. Similar laws are now pending in other states. The end game of all this new legislation, most on the pro-choice side of the debate believe, is to provide the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ammunition to challenge or overturn Roe v. Wade.

For years Dr. LeRoy Carhart traveled to Wichita each month to assist Dr. Tiller at his clinic. Following Tiller’s death, Carhart expanded his own abortion practice in Nebraska, but after the 2010 passage of the more restrictive law in the Cornhusker state, Dr. Carhart resettled on the East Coast. Kansas is considering passing a similar law, even though its one former abortion doctor is now dead. With tightening laws and rising sentiment against pro-choice, 87% of American counties have no abortion provider.

Because of this and other factors, Planned Parenthood and its hundreds of health centers have played an increasingly significant role in aiding millions of pregnant women, poor and otherwise. The organization offers 1.85 million low-income women family-planning counseling and screening for sexually-transmitted diseases, diabetes, and a variety of cancers; no other nationwide outfit in America offers this level of comprehensive care to women. Planned Parenthood does not receive taxpayer money for abortions, but does fund its own abortion services, so it too has come under attack. The House has proposed cutting the entire $317 million program of aid for family planning, and floated an amendment to keep Planned Parenthood from receiving a federal dime.

“What is more fiscally responsible,” U.S. Representative Mike Pence of Indiana recently asked his colleagues, “than denying any and all funding to Planned Parenthood of America?”

Rep. Pence has 154 co-sponsors for a bill to prevent the federal government from funding not just Planned Parenthood, but every clinic that provide abortions. Using a more guerilla-like approach, a group called “Live Action” has been running a sting operation on Planned Parenthood clinics in six states, trying to connect the staff to child prostitution.

In response to the new legislation, Democrats are trying to fight back, but on the defensive.

“We are sending a clear message to House Republicans that their agenda on women’s health is extreme,” said Senator Barbara Boxer of California. “It breaks faith with a decades-long bipartisan compromise, and it risks the health and lives of women. It also punishes women and businesses with a tax hike if they wish to keep or buy insurance that covers a full range of reproductive health care.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has called the latest round of anti-abortion activities the biggest assault women’s rights “in our lifetime.”

Then on February 17 at 11:30 p.m. on the House floor, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-California) abandoned her prepared remarks and spoke passionately about having an abortion years earlier because of a medical complication with her pregnancy. With a withering glance at Rep. Smith, she blasted him for thinking that women undertake these operations lightly and lambasted the House itself for focusing on abortion instead of improving the American economy and lowering the deficit: http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/18/jackie-speier-5-facts-about-the-congresswoman-who-discussed-her/?icid=maing|main5|dl1|sec3_lnk3|44986

This did not deter Rep. Smith or his colleagues. Dr. Tiller’s murder appears to have unleashed a new wave of energy for the anti-abortion movement to alter laws, shut down woman’s health services, and restrict or prevent abortions. Nothing has been the same since Roeder took the physician’s life.

The most startling development of all surfaced in South Dakota where Republican state representative Phil Jensen had introduced a law to expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include killings intended to prevent harm to a fetus -- legislation that some have interpreted as making it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. House Bill 1171passed out of committee on a 9-3 vote and is expected to face a floor vote in South Dakota’s GOP-dominated House.

In a press release, Boulder, Colorado’s Dr. Warren Hern, who for decades has received death threats as an abortion provider said the proposed bill “would legalize the assassination of abortion doctors…It would legalize vigilante terrorism against those of us who help women… Let’s be honest about the bill’s purpose. Its goal is to get people to kill doctors who perform abortions. It is utter madness and a descent into barbarism.”

Less than two years after Scott Roeder shot Dr. Tiller to death in his church, the momentum to limit abortions and intimidate physicians who provide medical care for women has undeniably gained force. No wonder so many young medical personnel have been driven away from learning about or offering such medical care to female patients. No wonder abortion opponents feel Roe v. Wade can be overthrown.

The Murder of Dr. George Tiller Plus Six More Dead in Arizona

Stephen Singular — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:53:17 GMT

I've written a new book about violence in America called:

THE WICHITA DIVIDE

               THE MURDER of DR. GEORGE TILLER, the BATTLE OVER ABORTION,

                                              and the NEW AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

It will be published in April 2011. Yesterday, as I watched six people get gunned down in Tucson, Arizona, and felt this tragedy roll across America as so many similar ones have, I went back and looked at my notes for the keys points in the new book. They read like a blueprint for what we're learning about the latest disaster in Tucson. Here they are:

1) THE WICHITA DIVIDE traces the growth of domestic terrorism and the normalization of division and hatred in the culture and the media from my first book, Talked to Death: The Life & Murder of Alan Berg, published in 1987, to the present.

2) It shows how these attitudes have moved from the fringes into the mainstream, and the consequences of creating, promoting, and rewarding a deeply divisive media.

3) It’s the first book-length account of the spike in racial and political violence since the inauguration of President Obama in January 2009 -- detailing ten murders in his first few months in office.

4) It looks at the history of the abortion conflict, the recent rise of the Tea Party Movement, and the bitter opposition to the Obama Administration as part of an underlying and growing civil war inside America itself.

5) It chronicles the talk show anger and the assault on the rule of law that’s fed this war for two decades. And it connects the dots between how demonizing or targeting an individual at the highest levels of the American media can end in murder.

6) It places this new war in the context of not just politics, but of a poisonous and irresponsible emotional atmosphere that’s pervaded the nation and resulted in mass violence at churches, schools, and other public institutions.

7) It documents how this hatred and anger have flourished in the media because they’re very good for business, regardless of the effect this has on our society.

8) All these themes are built into a dramatic narrative weaving together a biography of Dr. George Tiller, the nation’s most controversial abortion provider, and of Scott Roeder, the American terrorist who stalked the physician for years before killing him inside his house of worship.

9) A few weeks after the murder, I interviewed Roeder at the Wichita jail and he proudly talked about killing Dr. Tiller: “My only regret is that I didn’t do this sooner.” He adamantly denied that he was mentally ill, despite being diagnosed as schizophrenic in his youth.

10) The book doesn’t take sides in this new civil war, but examines the underlying causes for why we’ve become so divided. It suggests that until we recognize the source of the problem, we can only expect more bloodshed.

11) The Wichita Divide looks at this troubling reality less through political eyes than through the heart -- taking readers directly into the lives of those who’ve been trapped inside this war and felt its tragedy at point blank range. The book is about the human cost of teaching and encouraging the public to hate people who are different from or disagree with them…and how far we’ve gone down this road since the murder of Alan Berg 25 years ago.

12) This is a crime story, but not a true crime book. While focusing on the Tiller case, it examines the many examples of “random violence” that have infected America in recent years and puts them in the larger context of the emotional upheaval and instability of our time. Provoking people to hate, especially people who are at risk in terms of mental health, is a very dangerous game.

How many more people need to die before we discover that our words and actions have meaning and consequences?

Music as a Healing Force in America

Stephen Singular — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:17:33 GMT

Throughout the past 40 years, America has been increasingly divided by fighting a cultural war with itself and by the media carving up the country into “red” and “blue” states that apparently have little in common. Endless battles have erupted over gay marriage, immigration, abortion, gays in the military, religion, the role of government in individual lives, and other so-called “wedge issues.” They’ve certainly driven a wedge into the heart of our nation, if not a stake. This new civil war has been waged over the most personal issues we all confront, and the U.S. has seemed determined to tear itself asunder because it couldn’t find the empathy or the soul to grant a piece of privacy and dignity to every one of its citizens. It's been a recipe for constant sorrow.

Yet those who can’t agree on anything else have often found themselves standing next to “the enemy” and having a magnificent time at a musical event -- a bluegrass festivals, a blues concert, a rock show or other, similar venues. It's as if the music itself has been trying to bring together and heal what politics, religion, and petty quarreling have split apart; as if those twelve notes of our musical scale are trying to reach us and tell us that we’re better than this and have found solutions to larger and deeper problems during our past two-plus centuries as a nation. As if they're trying to remind us of how explosively creative we are and of what we can still become. Walt Whitman had once heard America signing, but if he were alive now and listening, he’d have heard it picking and strumming too.

Since the mid-1960s, the country had appeared increasingly dysfunctional on many levels, but the opposite was true of its music. The amount, the variety, and the quality of sounds the U.S. had produced during the past four or five decades has been astonishing, yet one has to dig below Top 40 radio and the Grammy Awards to appreciate this. As with so many other things in American life, music had fragmented, but virtually every fragment had generated new masters of their genre and of their instruments, from the mandolin to the violin to the harmonica. Not just in the U.S., but around the globe players have risen to extreme accomplishments, compared to the recent past. Gypsy jazz guitarists in Europe, like Stochelo Rosenberg and Jimmy Rosenberg, have taken Django Reinhardt’s luminous talent and expanded it well beyond him. The same is true among bluegrass pickers, banjoists, and blues guitarists. On the Internet you can now watch teenagers sit in their bedrooms and teach you how to play just like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck.

I’d once believed that when historians looked back on America in the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries, they’d praise our scientists and engineers, who’d driven forward so many technological breakthroughs, invented countless mechanical devices, and taken us to the moon. Or they’d honor the civil rights activists who’d struggled to provide equality under the law and equal opportunities for everyone. But I’d like to plug the musicians, who have filled a different but vitally important role in our lives -- teaching us through their hands and voices that we have more far in common with each other than not, and that we ignore this at our peril.

Ramsey Developments -- What You Can't Hear in a Sound Bite

Stephen Singular — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 21:07:10 GMT

On January 14, 2009, the day after Stan Garnett became the new Boulder DA, I called him because he’d publicly said that he wanted to look at the unsolved JonBenet Ramsey murder case with fresh eyes. Surprisingly, he called back the next day, in part because he’d had some connection to the Alan Berg assassination in Denver in 1984, the subject of my first book. A few weeks later, I made an appointment to drive up to Boulder and speak with him about the Ramsey case. He seemed open-minded about the now twelve- year-old homicide and told me that his office, Boulder Police Department personnel, and other law enforcement were having a powwow about the case at the end of February 2009.

In just the past two days, the substance of that meeting has become national news, and we’ve learned that a 20-some member advisory council made up of state and federal officials were at the gathering. We now know that they recommended the BPD go back and interview certain individuals connected to the case. One is Burke Ramsey, nine at the time of his sister’s death and now 23. What we don’t know and what seems very strange is that the BPD appears only now to be getting around to talking with these people -- a full nineteen months later. What they’ve been doing for the past year-and-a-half is about as mysterious as the murder itself. In my February ’09 talks with Garnett, I gave him some very specific information about people connected to child pornography whose names have been associated with JonBenet’s death. These leads had all been developed long after the murder, when certain people in Boulder had come forward to civilians with new information, in part because they did not want to go to the local police.

Initially, the Garnett appeared interested in opening up the investigation beyond the Ramsey family, just as the first DA on the case, Alex Hunter, had been when I’d approached him in April 1997. Back then, Hunter’s complaint to me was that the BPD did not want to conduct an investigation into child abuse and child pornography that went outside the Ramsey family, and he was clearly frustrated by this. Twelve years later, there was reason to hope that Garnett would follow through with his desire to broaden the investigation. Within a few weeks, however, he’d turned the case back over to the BPD; some of the very same detectives who’d narrowed the murder probe earlier were in charge of it once again, the first sign that maybe Garnett’s eyes were not all that fresh. In my future communications with the DA, he told me to pass along any information I had to the Boulder Police, as he did not have time to deal with it. So I did.

Let me be clear: we are talking about giving names to the Boulder Police Department of at least one offender convicted of child pornography charges, whose name had been raised by people in Boulder as having connections with the Ramsey homicide. When I attempted to convey this information to the BPD, I was essentially dismissed, as if this could not possibly be useful to them. I’m hardly the only one who had this experience. Throughout the past couple of years, I saw retired homicide detective Lou Smit on numerous occasions before he died in August 2010. He talked to me at length about the suspect list he’d put together since officially leaving the Ramsey investigation nearly a decade earlier, and sent along to the BPD. He felt the same kind of dismissive attitude toward him that I had -- despite having had a 90% clearance rate on his murder cases over decades of police work.

It would be fine to be dismissed if there was reason to believe that the BPD has now broadened its investigation and is willing to look in new directions. But if that isn’t the case, the public has the right to know what the police have been doing and how their tax dollars have been spent on this case.

I’ll have other things to say about information that was conveyed to the Boulder authorities around the time of this February 2009 powwow, but the critical question now is whether the BPD is going to interview more people beyond Burke Ramsey and other well known names in this case.

More to come.

JonBenet Ramsey News

Stephen Singular — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:18:32 GMT

In the spring of 2009, I posted something on my website about Boulder’s JonBenet Ramsey murder case, which got a far bigger and more heated response than anything else I’ve written on a blog. Some readers agreed with what I said, but others vehemently did not; armchair experts from coast to coast e-mailed to tell me how foolish and misguided I was in actually believing that the case remained unsolved -- they’d figured it out years ago. I was surprised by the passions the 12-year-old murder still stirred among those interested in the crime. I was contacted by several people with information possibly related to the case. It came from Florida, Hawaii, New Jersey, Colorado, and abroad. Most of it was about a sexual underground in Boulder and surrounding areas at the time of crime. It involved adult activity, but also child pornography and the sexual abuse of both young boys and girls. Despite all the publicity about the case, virtually none of this information became public during the first few years of the Ramsey investigation. There’s been little reason to believe that the Boulder Police Department had ever looked deeply into these leads.

I’ve always felt that one reason the homicide was never solved is that Boulder’s power structure did not want these underground elements to surface -- unless the local DA could make a successful case against one or two individuals and limit the damage to the city’s reputation. Since 1996, JonBenet’s murder itself has almost fallen into the background; what’s become as prominent and disturbing is why the case wasn’t broadly investigated and why so many leads were never seriously pursued.

Numerous other young victims of sexual abuse remain in the area, but were ignored following the murder. They’ve spoken with civilian investigators about their experience and provide an unsettling backdrop to Boulder in the years before the Ramsey case erupted. In recent years, several people have come forward and told me about other neglected leads. Since early 2009, some hard information has been passed along to the BPD -- and now, eighteen months later, there’s news out of Boulder that the police have been keeping the case alive and conducting new interviews. Let’s hope they’ve started looking at things, and at people, dismissed in the past. When authorities fail to act, only civilians are left to try to move cold cases forward. That isn’t how the system is supposed to work, but has it ever come close to working in Boulder regarding this homicide? From the beginning, the Boulder police seemed determined to nail Patsy Ramsey or nobody. Since 1996, they’ve gotten exactly nobody.

As for me not solving the case yet when so many others have, it might be good to remember one thing: This is the only known murder in human history in which a body and a ransom note were found in the same location. There are reasons for this odd fact that we’re still uncovering -- reasons that don’t make it a simple crime.

Now, in October 2010, new developments are surfacing in the Ramsey murder and the case may lurch forward again. I’ll be talking about some of these developments on MSNBC on Monday, October 4, 2010, at 2:15 Eastern time.

Columbine/Teaching Non-Violence

Stephen Singular — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 01:53:16 GMT

April 20, 2009, was the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, just a few miles from my Denver home. My wife, Joyce, and I visited the school a few days after the shootings and my lasting image of the event was seeing the adults kneel down in the springtime mud and sob, mystified over why our children were killing one another. In recent weeks leading up to this ten-year milestone, America has seen an outburst of mass killings -- in Pittsburgh, Oakland, Seattle, upstate New York, and elsewhere. They’ve occurred inside a church, a medical facility, and an immigration center. What they all have in common with Columbine is that they’ve been driven not by any form of personal gain, but purely by emotion. Feelings of rage erupted into gunfire and, in several cases, the killer ended up dead, just like at Columbine.

When kids go to school across the United States, they are forced, year after year, to learn about the abstractions of algebra and the complexities of biology or chemistry, but no one teaches them how to manage their emotions. To my knowledge, there are no mandatory classes about dealing with shame, guilt, fear, confusion, abusive comparisons, anger, and jealousy. Students aren’t given good alternatives to self-judgment and self-hatred. With a trillion or so dollars on the table to bail out the auto and financial industries, and trillions more spent on the U.S. military, maybe a few bucks devoted to this kind of instruction would save the lives of people we love in the future.

My 1994 book, Sweet Evil, tells the story of Jennifer Reali, a 28-year-old Colorado Springs wife and mother of two young daughters, who had an affair with Brian Hood, a 32-year-old Prudential salesman, born-again Christian, and father of three young children. During several months, he convinced Jennifer, a sensitive and intelligent woman, that God would never forgive her for their adultery, but wouldn’t mind if she dressed up in her husband’s army clothes and gunned down his wife, Dianne. Jennifer did just that and two days later walked into the Colorado Springs police station and confessed everything. She got life in prison, while Brian was eligible for parole after a dozen years.

Prior to the murder, Jennifer had never been in legal trouble or barely had a traffic ticket. She was, according to those who knew her best, a “normal” person who exploded into violence for a few seconds and then returned to herself, crying uncontrollably and apologizing to everyone for what she’d done. It was almost as if she expected the legal system to forgive her after she came to her senses, but it didn’t and she’s now in the 19^th year of her sentence. My wife and I visit her at the Colorado Women’s Correctional Facility in Denver and we’ve gotten to know her and her family. She wants to write about her experience and we’re assisting her.

Over the course of writing ten books about crime, I’ve come to think of evil not as a person, place or thing, but as a process that ends in tragedy. We’re trying to get Jennifer to break down the steps of that process. And to show readers what led her to abuse herself emotionally, first with her husband and then with Brian, and to show how a bright and decent human being can turn into a monster because he or she has no emotional intelligence. Maybe a piece of writing like this could help us understand how someone with no criminal past and no criminal tendencies can gradually turn into a death machine. It might even help deter a future killer. Who knows? Perhaps one day our culture will begin to value this kind of knowledge as much as photosynthesis and higher math.

How Lucky We Are

Stephen Singular — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:52:00 GMT

My son is a senior in high school and has been assigned to read a series of Great Books produced by mankind over the past several centuries. One is the 1865 classic, Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A few weeks ago, he bought a copy and put in on his bedroom floor (he’ll read it later in the school year). One evening I picked it up and began perusing the story from page one. I recalled reading the book, or at least parts of it, about 30 years ago, but as often happens I was startled by how little I could remember of what I’d read back in the 1970s. The only thing familiar to me was that the plot followed the adventures of the young Raskolnikov as he made his way around St. Petersburg before committing a murder.

As I began reading in 2010, I was struck again and again by one aspect of the book: the extreme poverty the author had chronicled on almost every page. The plot is slow by today’s standards, and the writing can appear overdone in places, but Dostoevsky was brilliant at describing what it’s like to be abjectly poor -- too poor to eat. You feel this condition of the characters, and the feeling accumulates and thickens as you go further into the book. It isn’t clear if this was primarily what Dostoevsky was trying to convey to 19^th Century readers, but it slams a 21^st Century reader in the face. Crime and Punishment had a tone of misery and despair due to poverty that’s almost overwhelming.

Did people really live in such desperate circumstances, you ask yourself, 150 years ago in Russia and Europe? How did they survive with almost nothing in terms of material goods -- only rags for clothing, only one tiny room to themselves, basically no furniture, and constantly in a state of hunger? Then you think about our lives today and all the computers we own, all the cars and all the garages full of tools and other knickknacks, all the Ipods, Ipads, Blackberries, cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and everything else that’s sprung up within the past decade and become for many of us virtual necessities. We think nothing of getting on an airplane and flying across the country, or even across the ocean. What we’re now doing every day would have been not just unimaginable a century and half ago, but impossible. We aren’t merely living like gods, in terms of our recent past, but acting like them when hurtling through the sky at 600 miles an hour.

The grinding poverty of Crime and Punishment made a far deeper impression on me than the legal, moral, and religious questions Dostoevsky was painstakingly laying out in the novel -- the things the book is really known for. This is not meant to diminish the poverty that still pervades parts of America and many pockets of humanity around the world. People are dying of hunger every day, and there may be more humans suffering now, in terms of sheer numbers, than in the 1860s. My point has more to do with the intended and unintended value of a work of literature that can survive for a lengthy period of time (history, it’s been said, is reflected nowhere so well as in the handful of fictional writings that have lasted and truly captured a given time and place). It’s one thing to read a scholarly tome about the conditions in Russia that led up to the revolution of 1917 and produced the Soviet Union. It’s quite another to see and to feel a great writer creating or re-creating those same conditions in ways that makes one squirm and feel terribly conscious of the fabulous wealth generated for many people during the past hundred years. Some of us are fortunate beyond belief.

Dostoevsky has made me appreciate more what I have in my own life, and to focus less on what I think I might be missing. That alone is a religious/spiritual experience, even though it may have never occurred to the author that he’d transmit such a perception/feeling to future generations. All writing is an act of faith -- a belief that it can affect someone you’ll never meet, or someone living long after you’re dead. What better gift than to be reminded that your life is a wonder that people from past centuries could not have conceived of? After that thought comes a wave of humility and we all need a good dose of that about every other day.

Who Is President Obama?

Stephen Singular — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:22:36 GMT

When Barack Obama was running for President, I kept waiting for him to deliver his vision for the American future. If elected, what did he want the country to look like nationally and internationally in ten to twenty years? What did he want to stop spending money on -- and to start spending money on? What did he feel was the appropriate use of power abroad, with the U.S. currently entangled in an economic crisis and two wars that appeared to have no end? When I mentioned all this to a couple of friends, they said, “Your expectations are unrealistic. He can’t do this now. He’s still trying to win the presidency.” Well, he won convincingly almost two years ago and I still haven’t heard him give this speech.

Obama ran on the slogan of “Change You Can Believe In,” and I’m convinced that the people who put him in office actually do want change -- especially of the kind that moves us away from the previous Bush Administration and its view of America’s military role in the world. That Administration had a very clear blueprint for increasing the U.S.’s clout across the globe, by whatever means necessary, and quickly set about pursuing this. What is Obama’s vision, compared to Bush’s? What alternatives exist to invading other countries and trying to remake them from the ground up, at costs beyond the astronomical? What should America be doing in this regard in the 21^st Century? I don’t know his views on these questions.

This is remarkable because he was such a stellar presidential campaigner. Sharing his thoughts and making speeches were his strengths, along with bringing his supporters together around winning the White House. Since doing so, he seems to have less confidence in expressing himself, instead of more. Leadership has both a real and a symbolic aspect. He’s been much better at the very real, behind-the-scenes, legislative arm-twisting that at acting like a true symbol of American change. Many of those who voted for him were not comfortable with the U.S. striding around the globe, invading other countries, and making our military presence the key ingredient of our foreign policy. They want America to re-define and refine its role in the world in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. This is another way of saying that they want to spend less money on foreign intervention and more on domestic matters that can aid the American economy and help American citizens. The U.S. simply doesn’t have the financial resources to do everything it might want to right now, and it’s time to establish some priorities. I’ve never heard the President address this fundamental issue.

He grew up living in several different worlds at once, as a black child coming of age around white people. He must have tried very hard to keep the peace inside his family and himself. Today, it’s as if he doesn’t want to take too firm of a stand on anything because he still wants his enemies -- and they are many and they are bitter and they are loud -- to like him. Here’s a hint, Mr. President: they aren’t going to like you, ever. They aren’t going to be reasonable and logical. They aren’t going to try to find any common ground with you. They despise you, for their own personal reasons much more than for political reasons, and you will never understand the roots of their feelings. So stop trying.

There are more Americans outside of their camp than inside of it, as your election proved, and you need to trust that more than you have. If your relative youth says anything about you, it’s this: one day you’ll give up thinking that people are going to like or accept you for what you are. Some never will, and they are basically a waste of your time. This is your one and only opportunity to be the President of the United States and to pursue the things you truly want for this country. The chance is slipping through your fingers. Turn this around before it’s too late.

Let the haters hate and try to articulate your own vision for America. More people still believe in you and in real change than you realize. Don’t forget or dismiss the convictions and dreams of the people who put you where you are. They’re still behind you.