Nathan McCall, in Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, examines senseless violence among young blacks. McCall's coverage of his own beating at the hands of a gang brings to mind two recent events--the tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where two young men murdered 12 fellow students and a teacher, and then killed themselves with shotguns, and the tragedy of a 16-year-old boy's murder of his parents a sister and suicide in Los Angeles. The general response of the public and the media to all such events is that they are examples of such senseless violence. Everybody wants to know why the young men (two were white and one is Latino) exploded with such violence, but nobody has yet made "sense" of it. This study will explore McCall's depiction of senseless violence related to the two recent murderous events in Colorado and Los Angeles. The study will argue that calling such violence "senseless" is a way for society to protect itself from the fact that human beings who are generally seen as "normal," more or less, could carry out such inhumane and bloody brutality. Such "senseless" violence, in fact, may be a means whereby society lets off some of the great pressure which builds up in a harshly competitive and materialistic society.
Incidents of senseless violence fill McCall's book. One particularly horrible incident is the beating of McCall himself (McCall 69-70):
I fell and felt the force and number of blows multiply as they kicked me with their [steel-toed shoes] and beat me with pipes and clubs. The pain ricocheted like a pinball from my head to my toes and back again. I curled up in the fetal position and tried to cover my head to cushion the blows. . . . It seemed an eternity passed and the beating went on. Then my fear turned to horror; the horror comes the instant you realize that
. . . they don't know how many blows to the head will bring permanent damage or death (McCall 70).