In fact, those are the moments when silence makes the most sense. When all words sound insufficient, and all explanations, no matter how lucid, sound futile.
A crime from a Belgrade school stunned the world. The XNUMX-year-old killed eight elementary school students and a janitor and wounded another ten students and a teacher. The filmic cruelty of the act, the astonishing calculation and lack of remorse of the killer, the "scenario" created in the spirit of some bloody video game, all these are questions for serious expert analysis. Although, by all accounts, film and TV screenwriters will deal with all this before.
However, it may already make sense to point out one layer of this tragedy. I am thinking of weapons and the disgusting fascination with weapons that is not only in Montenegro but also in the entire Balkans and beyond, part of the "general culture". I say "and further", because the bloody chapters of history cannot end here. In our country, bloody history is the only thing that is taken seriously, everyone is different, he believes homo balcanicus, waste of time. A huge number of young people grow up with such stories and the mythology of weapons in our region.
It's been less than a year since in this place, and on the occasion of the school massacre in Texas, weapons were discussed. This is how media civilization works - what you had in Texas or Arizona yesterday, you have in your neighborhood today...
Quite simply, without the availability of his father's gun, this unfortunate boy would not have become a monstrous killer the other day. And who knows how many other situations where the availability of weapons cost someone their head, and made someone a murderer.
As we said, these weapons are often the subject of personal or family stories, more likely appropriate "fairy tales", which were heard countless times under that roof. As a rule, the insane glorification of weapons is a symptom that clearly testifies to the distance from enlightenment and the spirit of modernity.
The information that Montenegro is third in the world in terms of armaments (per capita, I guess?) would hardly make anyone happy. With this degree of increase in violence and especially juvenile violence on the streets of Montenegrin cities, this information should further disturb people.
The second, hellishly disturbing moment is the age of the criminal.
Man's natural urge is to idealize the children's world, yes, from the point of view of an adult, everything there seems more innocent than in the real world. As fundamentally noble as that impulse is, I'm not sure it's a smart one.
Especially today, when the area of "children's" has been devastated to such an extent from the zone of media, pop culture, politics - that this area has probably been reduced to a historical minimum. At an astonishingly early age, children are exposed to information that they simply cannot fully understand.
In 1954, an unusual and great English writer William Golding published the novel "Lord of the Flies". The novel has long been a "modern classic", and I remember at least three editions from the twilight years of the SFRY, so it is very likely that it is part of your reading experience as well. However, a short reminder (from memory): a group of British students, and members of a singing choir, after a plane crashes near a deserted Pacific island, try to survive. Instead of innocent children's games and socializing, Golding shows us how in these laboratory conditions (deserted island, clean children), all the repressive mechanisms of adult society are unmistakably reproduced. A great book that thoroughly disturbs with its anthropological insight.
One of my long-deceased cousins knew what a demonstration of intelligence (and "maturity") of one of the numerous grandchildren, to say, somewhat wistfully - "No more children".
Maybe it really is. In the strong need - irrationally supported by society and the media - to become "mature" as soon as possible (therefore more serious consumers) - perhaps the space of childhood has really evaporated in front of all the wonders of this world.
And that, I'm afraid, is too big a price for our new and old illusions...
Bonus video:
