Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America
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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 w
. . .
ospital was to focus on getting a gun so that he would never be beaten again. Getting a gun made "sense" to him. In other words, senseless violence breeds more and worse senseless violence, as the cycle of escalation intensifies.
The more the investigators look into the case of the two teenage killers in the Littleton, Colorado, massacre, the more it becomes clear that it will never make "sense" to the investigators, to the media obsessed with the event, or to the public obsessed with media coverage:
Nearly two weeks after the bloodiest high school shooting in U.S. history, the difficult and massive investigation has been characterized by what authorities don't know instead of what they have uncovered (Cart and Slater A1).
Everybody wants to know why the massacre took place, as if knowing "why" the killers did it will make "sense" out of it. Even if it were possible to know why the killers did it, it would still never make "sense" to people who cannot imagine going to school and killing thirteen people, fellow students, injuring many more, throwing pipe bombs around, and then killing oneself. It is known that they played violent video games, that they were rejected and mocked by other students, that one was more the leader and
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Approximate Word count = 1667
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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