Red Lake Hardly Registers

March 28, 2005

We're predictable. Shoot up a bunch of white kids and we're all over it, like cats on milk. The people who run the media in this country are mostly white and when dead kids look like their kids, their faces are on the front page. And that's where they stay for days, while pundits and politicians ask the predictable “Whys?’'

That no one is asking why in the case of Jeff Weise, the 16-year-old Native American who went on a shooting spree last week, killing his grandfather, his grandfather's girlfriend, six students and a security guard before killing himself, says much more about America values than it does about one troubled kid who didn't stand a chance from the get-go.

This is what we were consumed with after this massacre: The long, slow dying of a woman who has been dying for years. ``American Idol,'' whether the voting miscue was a stunt or not. Britney Spears. Is she pregnant or isn't she? And, after a five-week hiatus, ``Desperate Housewives'' is restarting. 

Columbine shocked us. The massacre at Red Lake High School hardly phased us. Why? Because Jeff Weise didn't grow up in a nice, white suburb and didn't live in a nice, white neighborhood and he didn't have parents we could look at and say,  “We could be them.’'

Weise hardly had parents at all. His father killed himself when Jeff was 7 and his mother may as well have. She beat her boy. She locked him out of the house. She told him he was nothing. And she drank and drank and got in a car crash, totaled her brain and now lives in a nursing home.

What Jeff Weise did was predictable. He was a loner. He was disturbed. He was depressed. He was teased. He was a time bomb.

And no one noticed because he grew up in a Third World nation that happens to sit smack dab in the middle of this nation. Native

Americans want it this way. But reservation life is not working.

At Red Lake Reservation, Minn., the median income is $22,000. Unemployment is more than 50 percent. Four of every five students meet government poverty standards. One of every four is in special ed. Drug abuse, alcoholism, teen pregnancy are rampant. Reservation life is a failure. But who cares? It's out of sight, out of mind, even when nine people are shot.

Half a world away, we're fighting a war for freedom. President Bush says Iraq's freedom is worth U.S. lives. What about Native Americans? What about the only people who really are Americans?

You don't see Mr. Bush rallying the troops to save them. You don't see lawyers in front of cameras fighting for them because there's no money to be made on poor people. You don't see judges scrambling to help. Or governors changing laws. Or the Supreme Court being asked to weigh in on it.

Americans took to praying for a woman in a coma. It's easy to pray. It's a lot harder to do something. Native Americans are foreigners in their own country. They live and they die and really, who cares?