A few brave commentators--Alexander Cockburn and Sean Gonsalves spring to mind--have been among the lone voices noticing the relationship between the violence in a Littleton, Colo., high school and U.S. and NATO violence in Yugoslavia. Yes, they are related. But they are not so simply related as some would have it. The violence of an America at war in 1999 was not what gave permission one April for kids to open fire; indeed, they had planned the carnage since long before most of us knew the word "Kosovo."

The relationship is much broader. It is this: in the lives of today's teenagers America has always gone to war to get its way, to resolve conflicts of any kind. The average high school student has spent over half of his or her life watching the U.S. punish the people of Iraq whenever Saddam Hussein mouthed off--and compared it, accurately, to the third grade bully who would pummel the hapless kid in the class, whenever he felt like it, until the poor victim agreed to whatever humiliating phrase the bully felt like imposing. That has been U.S. foreign policy for the last century, but it's only been in the last decade that no power in the world could challenge it. We are watching the fruits of our first post-Berlin Wall generation.

In such circumstances, the quote of Bill Clinton (featured as ETS!'s Quote of the Week last week, and by far the most requested QOTW we've ever had) was especially galling and obnoxious. Clinton, probably totally unconsciously, used a violent metaphor ("hammer home") to lecture the nation's youth about the evils of violence while proudly orchestrating the bombing of Serbia back to the Stone Age. Bill Clinton, like all presidents, uses hammers at every opportunity--and every enemy is a nail, waiting for use in the crucifixion of that enemy's people. Most teens in America probably noticed the hypocrisy of Clinton's statement, and all should have been profoundly insulted by it.

As should we all. If Clinton hungers for legacies, he's acquiring them like a rap sheet: war criminal, accused serial rapist, pathological liar, shredder of the Constitution, eager whore to the profoundly wealthy. He earned early on, for some of the wrong reasons, the utter contempt of the far right, whose character judgment has in this case turned out to be pretty good. For sheer vulgarity Clinton has achieved amazing heights. (Let's hope Al Gore is as incapable of such grotesque competence as George Bush was of recreating Ronald Reagan's warped magic.)

Meanwhile, back at the schoolyard, commentators are blaming everything but the obvious for the Littleton shootings. Fifty-something (or, in the case of Sam Donaldson, sixty-something) TV pundits, once hired for their youthful beauty but now lacking that and brains, have droned on continuously regarding every aspect of the evils of youth culture, as though they are all new and bizarre revelations: Marilyn Manson and KMFDM, violent TV and magazines, violent gaming, adolescent fantasies on web sites, black eyeliner and (gasp! Call the police!) black trench coats.

Once again, as every teen knows, this is patently ridiculous. Violent kids come from a violent world, and alienated kids come from an alienating world. It may at times overlap, but it's not the same thing--as proven by the violent adults in this violent world, who, far from being alienated, are concentrated at its highest levels of power and public adulation.

Last month's murders in Colorado gave the nation's media another chance to titillate, sensationalize, and promote fear at the expense of our nation's young. It especially fits neatly into the universe of local TV news, with its emphasis on violent crime--often committed by youth, and especially youth of color. Viewers come away with the unconscious or often explicit impression that such violence is on the rise, pandemic, and that we are raising a generation of kids that is somehow fundamentally Not Like Us. Bullshit. As a simple function of means, the violence that is present among youth is less prevalent, and less sophisticated, than that of the surrounding adult world. On the same day that 15 died in Colorado, some 250 kids died of preventable disease and malnutrition due to the economic sanctions against Iraq. That's sophisticated violence, random and terrifying, and we didn't hear a word about it.

The myth of violent youth fuels all sorts of repressive political trends: curfews, 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 Littleton and in every town, is not the violence inflicted by youth, but the violence inflicted on youth, from TV, Ritalin-style mind-controlling drugs, and high 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 jealousy) adults manifest toward teens. And that's for the kids who hail from "good" towns like Littleton. The ones in "bad" neighborhoods, or with inappropriate skin colors, or going hungry, or pregnant, or with unstable or abusive parents or no parents at all, have considerably more to overcome.

It's easy to imagine calls for (more) metal detectors in schools, for more aggressive psychological screening of students, for tougher juvenile crime sentences, and other such responses to Littleton. The concern is understandable, but the fear and mistrust it demonstrates in our nation's youth sends exactly the wrong message. Our public schools need to be places for learning, not minimum security prisons. Putting more resources in our kids' lives--a pay hike for teachers is an obvious issue, but far from the only one--would do a lot more to demonstrate that we care.

But even if this country's adults can convince its youth that we, as a society, care for and love them--an unlikely stretch in itself--there's still the hypocrisy of war and violence. According to Bill Clinton, violence is always the wrong way to resolve conflict. Why, then, do we not spend $400 billion or so each year on nonviolent conflict resolution, on "peace armies" that mediate and that put their bodies in harm's way? Instead, we spend that money on weapons and war, on "soldiers" that kill via pushbutton from time zones away, and we refuse to pay our bills to the United Nations to help it maintain its relatively primitive efforts in nonviolent peacekeeping. At home, we are still guilty of hypocrisy when we say we care and never resort to violence while we lock up a generation of black youth at gunpoint, when we throw away the key on victimless crimes like drug use, when we occupy our cities' streets with domestic armies of cops convinced (often accurately) that they are at war. Is this a society of hypocrites? Of course it is. For generations, we have poured our money and technological savvy into ever more elaborate ways to kill, ever more refined ways to control civilian populations, and we have completely ignored the technology of reconciliation. Then we lecture kids about violence.

Even after a tragedy like Littleton, such concerns aren't even on our country's pundit radar. Our country's violence is so ingrained, so basic to our existence, that we don't even recognize it when it slaps us upside the head. Not recognizing it, we are powerless to deal with it. Until this country--starting at its highest levels--stops acting like a thug whenever it can get away with it and celebrating it as glorious, then somewhere, in some good neighborhood, in a house with fine and loving parents, an alienated teen is going to once again draw the obvious lesson: mowing down a schoolyard is pretty fucking cool.