Last week's school shootings in Springfield, Oregon, gave corporate media another chance to titillate, sensationalize, and promote fear at the expense of our nation's youth. They didn't disappoint, though they did repulse.

Tragic as the killings were, they would not have been evening news leads for days had the protagonist been a troubled meatpacker. No headlines would scream: "Man, 41, opens fire at job." The selling point for corporate media was fear and emotion: the fear that your kid might be shot, or--the ultimate fear--might be one of those time bombs among our nation's pantheon of young predators and you don't even know it. Live reports at eleven.

The myth of violent youth fuels all sorts of repressive political trends: curfews (mercifully ruled unconsitutional in Washington state earlier this month), harassment of youth dances and gatherings, criminalizing runaways and the homeless, the ever-expanding juvenile gulag, and far too much more. Young people in Washington state essentially have no rights under the law; they grow up seeing politicians dedicating projects "for the kids" while they treat those kids with fear and contempt--and, needless to say, never actually listen to young peoples' opinions, which are often astonishingly well-informed and insightful.

The real story, in Springfield and in every town, is not the violence inflicted by youth, but the violence inflicted on youth, from the TV, mind-controlling drugs, and expectations of early childhood, through the soul-deadening experience that is the American schooling system, and on to the pure phobia (equal parts terror, fear, and jealously) adults manifest toward teens. And that's for the kids, like Kip Kinkel, who come from "good" families; the ones in "bad" neighborhoods or with inappropriate skin colors, or going hungry, or pregnant, or with unstable or abusive parents or none at all, have considerably more to overcome. Until our political leaders start demonstrating some genuine love--and trust--for all of our nation's youth, the crocodile tears shed over incidents like last week's murders will continue to burn holes in our future wherever they fall.