There’s something uniquely horrific about school shootings. The overwhelming majority of the time, parents can feel safe knowing that their kids are safe in classrooms, which only makes incidents like the one at Red Lake High School this week all the more tragic.
With this in mind, questions about why the White House hasn’t acknowledged the tragedy seem appropriate.
When gunmen seized a school in Beslam, Russia, in September, for example, the Bush administration expressed its concern. Indeed, Dick Cheney, in a move of questionable taste, worked the incident into his political stump speech for a few weeks, trying to connect the incident with a broader war on terrorism.
Looking back further, Mahablog noted today that Bill Clinton was addressed the nation within a few hours of the Columbine shootings.
And yet, President Bush hasn’t acknowledged the shootings in Minnesota at all. Native Americans are right to wonder why.
Native Americans across the country — including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members — voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence.
Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.
“From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence, the Red Cross has come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn’t said or done a thing,” said Clyde Bellecourt, a Chippewa Indian who is the founder and national director of the American Indian Movement here. “When people’s children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, he should be the first one to offer his condolences…. If this was a white community, I don’t think he’d have any problem doing that.”
The White House has said it will acknowledge the tragedy in tomorrow’s radio address. Like his responses to a variety of other calamities (My Pet Goat, Asian tsunami), one wonders if it’ll be too little, too late.
One also has to wonder if Bush would have been equally reticent if the religious right had expressed its concerns for the shooting.
“The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can’t take time to speak is very telling,” said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.
Bush’s credibility in the Native American community was already pretty bad; this is going to make matters considerably worse.