WHENEVER a scene of demonic horror occurs in one of our modern indoctrination centers known as schools, we are reminded again of just how much niceness keeps these sterile, ugly, soulless places afloat. Teddy bears, candlelit vigils, a tidal surge of unanimous praise for the niceness of the victim follow nightmarish, bloody carnage. Philip Chism was only 14 years old and yet he stabbed a teacher to death with a craft knife after hiding in a suburban Massachusetts classroom and waiting to accost her. He then placed her body in a recycling bin and walked out the door. He went to the latest Woody Allen movie after dumping the body in the woods and then wandered the streets, alone with his demonic secret in a perfectly nice community.
How can we explain this? There seems to be no way to process it in the vocabulary of nice. Teddy bears, candles and pledges to remember the deceased are the best answers it can give. Even the murderer in this case is believed to have been nice. Of Philip Chism, one of the few blacks in the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, The Daily Mail reports:
Other students, who played soccer with accused 14-year-old Chism, said that he was a really nice boy but incredibly shy and hard to get to know.
One said: ‘He was nice, but really quiet. No one really knew him that well. Apparently when he was arrested he was unresponsive and barely said anything at all.
Beneath the pervasive niceness, there is breathtaking hard-heartedness. One wonders whether Philip Chism, who may have been overwhelmed with phony niceness during his few months in Danvers because he was black and may have been used to demonstrate the wonderful tolerance of others, saw through this in some childish, intuitive way. There is no real love in these places. Where love is not, hatred blooms. It erupts after a period of silent, invisible fermentation. However nice the teacher Colleen Ritzer may have been, she worked for a brutally indifferent institution. She gave herself obliviously to a system that denies God with matter-of-fact efficiency and refuses to teach a student something so basic to life as prayer. Where God is not, Satan is. And he’s just not very nice.
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