The shooting death in Oxnard, California of a 15-year-old boy by a classmate earlier this month has spurred two primary responses: a call for tolerance (the slain youth was openly gay) and demands for enhanced school safety (the shooter smuggled a gun into a classroom).

            Neither of these remedies is likely to prevent future violence.

In the weeks before the shooting, the victim, eighth-grader Lawrence “Larry” King, had begun wearing high-heeled boots, jewelry and makeup to E.O. Green Junior High School. In the days leading up to the incident, several boys, including his attacker, taunted him.

But the reaction among King’s classmates after the shooting suggests that these bullies were outliers. Students created a makeshift memorial of flowers, candles, stuffed animals and other mementos at the school, and more than 1,000 youths attended a march for tolerance in King’s honor just a few days after his death. Many students, including the student body co-president, spoke of their affection for King. This outpouring of grief and support came from King’s peers. They accepted --or at least tolerated – King and were deeply shaken by his death.

E.O. Green, like all schools in the nation's most populous public school system, follows a state-mandated safety plan. Staffers monitor entrances and exits on the gated campus. A full-time counselor and a part-time psychologist are on hand to deal with problem kids. Students must wear uniforms (a video on the school’s website explaining the policy features a boy extracting an elaborate array of weaponry from his baggy jeans and loose shirt) and adhere to a strict dress code, which prohibits facial piercings, hats, clothing with logos and accessories with points or chains.

State law bars bullying and harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and school district officials told reporters that they were aware of friction between the two boys and had offered counseling to both. The alleged shooter, 14-year-old eighth grader Brandon McInerney, had no criminal history and was described in news accounts as generally a good student. After the shooting the school was locked down, the weapon was retrieved and the boy was apprehended by police a few blocks from campus. This was the first gun-related incident in the school’s 48-year history. Under the existing safety rubric, E.O. Green was as safe as any school could be.

Despite a largely tolerant student body and an administration that adhered to established safety standards, the school failed to keep one child from harm and another from harming him. As this shooting makes painfully clear, it is a mistake to focus exclusively on safety or tolerance, both of which require little or no engagement on the part of students. Gates and metal detectors offer a false sense of security -- mainly to adults. A “live and let live” mentality requires no action by anyone.

It would be easy to say that no school can ever be free of the specter of violence. But real solutions do exist.

In 2001, in the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, a RAND Corporation study found that “many school-violence prevention strategies are limited and may even backfire in the long run.” Programs that don’t work are those that focus solely on “physical safety measures, zero-tolerance policies and at-risk youth,” according to the study, presented to the California State Assembly Select Committee on School Safety (now known as the Select Committee on Youth Violence Prevention).

            The report was authored by Jaana Juvonen, chair of the developmental psychology program at UCLA. In recent years her work has focused primarily on middle schools, where students need a tremendous amount of help to overcome the perception that violence is "cool" -- help they are not getting.

Prevention works best, according to Juvonen's report, when it includes “explicit anti-harassment school policy; instruction for all students to help them understand the policy and develop conflict-resolution skills; and case-by-case staff mediation that reinforces both school policy and instruction.”

The study outlines the way to non-violence, and it isn’t easy. What schools need are approaches that “enhance psychological safety in addition to physical safety, include instructional programs aimed at changing social norms and developing mediation skills, involve all students instead of only the problematic ones, and are preventive instead of reactive.”

Change social norms. Involve all students. Prevent, don’t react. Few – if any – public schools have invested in this kind of labor-intensive transformation. Yet even in these lean budget times, the money for non-violence programs is out there, tucked in to existing school safety programs and block grants such as the federally funded Safe and Drug Free School Program, of which E.O. Green is a beneficiary.

The know-how is out there too. The Hamilton Fish Institute on School and Community Violence, for example, housed at George Washington University, was created by Congress in 1997 to provide "information, research, and support to make schools safer for high achievement." Working in seven states including Oregon, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New York, they conduct needs assessments at schools and train teachers, emphasizing violence prevention. Here in Los Angeles, the Center for Nonviolent Education and Parenting offers classes and support for parents, teachers and caregivers.

Many organizations are enagaged in this work. If we want truly safe and tolerant schools we must enlist their help in creating a culture of non-violence.

            “Come in, you poor thing. Would you like a cup of tea? A bath? A nap?”

It was my first visit to Bernard Taper’s home, a sunny tree house of a place up a steep hill in Berkeley. He stood in the doorway with his wife, the poet Gwen Head, assuring me, it seemed, that there was no disaster they could not fix. The year was 1991 and I was 23, a graduate student in journalism at UC Berekely. Bernard was one of my professors, and he’d agreed to help me with an outside assignment I’d taken on, a major profile for the local alternative weekly. His graciousness brought tears I had until that moment denied.

How hard could it be to write a profile? That question -- its confident disregard for something about which I knew very little-- typified my approach to writing then. Usually the damage was minimal since most of what I wrote was read by an audience of one -- my professor. But this was serious and I was, for once, at a total loss.

The work was a mess, but Bernard saw promise. He set aside his own stacks of uncorrected student papers and unfinished writing projects to focus on mine. Pacing his dining room, the San Franciso Bay framed in the picture window behind him, Bernard offered suggestions and insights, and counseled me not to sucumb to impatient editors inclined to push the work where I did not want it to go.

What Bernard did not do, and what a lesser editor surely would have, was rewrite the piece. I can’t say I succeeded in creating something good and coherent and true, but working with Bernard made me realize just how hard this business of writing really is, and how much I need a teacher -- an editor -- like him.

Joan Didion put it this way, in “After Henry”:

What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ … The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental: the editor … was the person who gave the writer the idea about himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it.

This is a tricky undertaking, and requires the editor not only to maintain a faith the writer shares only in intermittent flashes but also to like the writer, which is hard to do. Writers are only rarely likeable. They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at the typewriter. They fear their contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent, even doubtful.

            Bernard’s motivating interests were good ideas and good, clear writing, which weren’t as commonly the focus then as one might have wished in a journalism program. They seemed to be the only things worth his time. Early on in his career he’d worked as a daily newspaper reporter. After World War II the government sent him to Europe to track down and retrieve art stolen by the Nazis. While on staff at the New Yorker he’d written a profile of Hitler’s photographer. He’d written several books, including the definitive biography of Balanchine. He treated his students with the same respect some of his colleagues reserved for “real” writers. He seemed to enjoy our company – he played tennis regularly with some of my classmates. This was the kind of person I wanted to become. In order to be like Bernard, I reasoned, it was a good idea to be around people like Bernard.

The problem, as I soon learned, is that people like Bernard – and especially editors like Bernard -- are as rare as summer rain in Los Angeles. Great editors don’t seem to do well inside the confines of corporate-controlled media. Or inside the confines of anybody-controlled media. They focus on the writers and the work and have little or no interest in the politics of the place.

When I left grad school early to take an intership at the LA Times, Bernard agreed to stay on as my thesis advisor, permitting me to use a series I’d written for the Times as my thesis. It was a plodding, three-part description of the modes of transportation in Ventura County. I was proud. Not of the content, which mattered little, but of the accomplishment itself: my thesis was published.

Bernard was not so easily wowed. He critiqued the work with the rigor of an editor who expected insight, not just information. The editors at the Times were teaching me to report and write in that dutiful, daily journalism way that in any but the most deft of hands drains the juice right out of the story. My hands were far from deft. I got my stories right and I got them quick. Bernard expected more. He expected me to think deeply and to write well.

            Over the years I’ve returned to the house on the hill many times, visiting with Bernard and Gwen in their yellow living room or out on their shaded brick patio. I’ve gone alone, with my husband, and with our two young children, who are never scolded for their energetic explorations of the house and the yard. Not too long ago my then-four-year-old son (who could not swim) plunged into the pool, prompting my husband, fully clothed, to dive in after him.

            The incident was treated with amusement. Bernard produced a fluffy white bathrobe for my husband and Gwen collected the wet clothes and tossed them in the dryer. If any of us had required a bath, a nap or a cup of tea, we certainly would have been accommodated. Instead, we all sat down to one of Bernard’s Crab Louis salads, a bottle of Prosecco and a fruit tart from the local bakery that was better, Bernard assured us, than any he’d had in Paris.

             A year or so ago, when I was on the verge of signing a contract to write a book, I sought counsel from others who’d been through it. There was envy, there was praise, there was practical advice. Bernard, alone among those with whom I spoke, offered words of caution. “Well,” he said gravely. “Writing books is a hard way to live. I suppose if you’re planning on teaching it’s a helpful thing to do.” Bernard’s words made me realize that what I’d been seeking was not advice but affirmation: you are free now to think I’m good at what I do, because an editor in New York who does really impressive books picked me.

Bernard was not impressed. He already liked me. He wanted to make sure I knew, as much as one can know, what I was getting myself into. Now, deep into the morass that might one day become a book, I understand what he was talking about.

Bernard had read the piece that started this process. It was an essay I wrote for Mother Jones about being “outed” as white in second grade by my black classmates at an inner-city Catholic school on the near South Side of Chicago in the mid-1970’s. I hadn’t done much of that kind of writing before, so deep was my fear that I’d devolve into self-indulgent plaint.

Bernard’s favorite part of the piece was a description of my puzzlement at the giddy posture of the other children as they recounted the beatings they’d endured, and of how they tried to best one another with tales of switches and whippings. I suggest in the piece that perhaps an ackowledgement of the true pain of their experience would have been too hard for them. These are the same children who, throughout the rest of the piece, are my torturers. They tease, taunt and hurt. This moment of empathy, Bernard told me, deepened the piece.

I was surprised because that line seemed a little hokey to me, sentimental even, which I saw as a failure of expression. But recently I picked up “The Situation and the Story” by Vivian Gornick:

In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind; engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the ‘other’ as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.

When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir – where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster – the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

It was in that one line that I attempted to see things from the perspective of those other kids. Bernard saw it.

            Around the time the piece came out in Mother Jones, I was -- unbeknownst to myself -- embarking on a new chapter in my life. One of the life-changing events that occurred was an awful fight with my mother. I said mean and horrible things to her and she shut down, never to return to me (that was two and a half years and a mountain of shunned apologies ago). For months after the fight, distracted from writing as I tried to reconcile with my mother and then to come to terms with her unwillingness (inablity?) to forgive, I sought advice and comfort from friends and family. They clucked and tsked and urged me to do whatever it took to make it right or I would never forgive myself.

Not Bernard. When I told him of the “break” he said, “Wow, it took this long?” It was such a comfort. It wasn’t that he was telling me not to try to make it better, or that I shouldn’t grieve at this profound heartbreak. He was simply ackowledging that this was normal, that mothers are people too. They, just like anyone else, are capable of rejecting – even their own children. It would not ruin me. It did not make me a bad daughter or a bad person. I also took his comment to mean, “That’s no excuse for not writing. Get a grip and get on with it.”

            At the end of February Bernard celebrates his 90^th birthday. When a friend called to tell me, I was astonished. Not at his living this long, which only makes sense for such a vital soul, but because Bernard makes turning 90 look like so much more fun than turning 40, which is what I’ll be doing next month.  I know if I shared this observation with Bernard he'd laugh and say "It is."

The Great Medicine of the Three Mountain Peaks is to be found in the body of the woman and is composed of three juices, or essences: one from the woman's mouth, another from her breasts, and the third, the most powerful, from the Grotto of the White Tiger, which is at the Peak of the Purple Mushroom (the mons veneris). – Octavio Paz. Conjunctions and Disjunctions. trans. Helen R. Lane. 1975. (London: Wildwood House, 1969) p. 97 (this citation courtesy of Wikipedia).

1. Billie Holiday: "Funny, he never asks for my money. All that I give him is honey, and that he can spend anytime." A marvellously contemporary take on true love.

2. Here, a tight ache of a fantasy, brought to us by the inimitable Talking Heads...

3. ...Which Trick Daddy and his posse (that's Cee-Lo hittting all the high notes) transform into a refreshingly non-misogynistic, deeply jamming and hilarious tribute to cunnilingus ("sugar on my tongue, tongue, yippee yippee yum yum").

Sugar, three ways

            Hey girlfriend. Switch on your headset and listen to this: my fresh new March issue of The Atlantic just arrived via snail mail and boy am I glad. That “Which Religion Will Win” cover story is interesting and all, what with nothing less than the fate of the world at stake, and I guess it’s important to know about China’s Firewall and America’s ongoing real estate crisis.

But let’s face it: that’s all just fishwrap for the real meat. “Marry Him! The Case for Settling” by Lori Gottlieb, informs us lovely ladies of the urgency of matrimony, especially when Mr. Right turns out to be Mr. Just So-So (go for it anyway, ‘cause time is running out and you probably won’t be able to do any better).

It’s a must read!

I’ll admit, though, that I don’t understand why it took more than 5,000 words to tell me what I’d already read in an 800-word feature in my March issue of Cosmo called “ ‘Mr. Wrong Turned Out to Be So Right.’ ”

In Atlanto (that’s my pet name for the mag – more feminine, no?) Gottlieb says: “Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics.” She also says you should go ahead and get married when you’re young, “when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when it involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods.”

Duh.

Here’s how Cosmo put it: “These chicks took a chance with guys totally not their type… and hit the love jackpot.”

We hear from Laurie, 25, who says of her mate, “We have mismatched tastes in movies, music, clothing, food, you name it. But somehow, he understands me better than anyone else, and we love that we don’t have to conform for each other.” And Christie, 18: “My boyfriend had a crush on me for years before we actually started dating. I thought he was a really nice guy, but I wasn’t attracted to him. He has always struggled with weight issues and had some trouble asserting himself… Now I know that bigger guys make great teddy bears, and I never feel bad about ordering dessert!”

            The similarities are enough to make you wonder: is Atlanto yanking Cosmo’s chain? Come to think of it girlfriend, I’ve been noticing some serious Atlanto voguing in recent months, starting back in March 2007 when they dipped into Sex/Self Help/Relationships – a Cosmo staple – with “She’s Just Not That Into You” by Sandra Tsing Loh. Then there were those Fashion/Consumer stories in April 2007 (“Carried Away” by Lynne Yaeger) about designer handbags, and in December 2007 (“Rightsize Me” by Virginia Postrel) about blue jeans.

And don’t get me started on the Cautionary Tales – a Cosmo fave -- with Caitlin Flanagan, Atlanto’s Henny Penny for all things femme, giving us: "The Age of Innocence" in April 2007 (cautionary tale about the perils of college); “The Sanguine Sex” in May 2007 (cautionary tale about the perils of abortion); and “Babes in The Woods” in July/August 2007 (cautionary tale about the perils of My Space).

Girlfriend, couched though they may be in the larger “meaning” of the thing and larded with erudition (lots of knowing literary, socio-political and cultural references), at their core, these are Cosmo stories, the bread and butter of the single girl’s mag trade.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m always up for a good read about loveless marriages, handbag trends or college coeds gone wild. But is it just me or does anyone else feel like that ground’s pretty well covered, in oh, say 40 or 50 glossy magazines available on any well-stocked news rack, not to mention 10,000 or so websites.

Could it be that this primo Atlanto real estate might be put to better use doing what the mag promises on its website when it says “readers turn to The Atlantic for intellectual stimulation, innovative opinions, and an environment of open dialogue on subjects ranging from foreign affairs, politics, and the economy to cultural trends.”

Okay, so I get it. These are cultural trend stories with a capital W.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing, though, if the trends they chose were deeper than the LA River? Like, say, widespread clinical depression among women over 40, or the recent surge in murder-suicide domestic violence here in LA where I live. Or even the ongoing gender-based wage inequity that persists in America. But where’s the fun in that? If the women won’t be the dancing bears who will?

Oh well, enough of this serious stuff. Time for my spa treatment. Kiss kiss.

Ciao.

I’ve long been registered as a non-partisan voter.As such, I’m used to the indignities and disenfranchisements that accompany opting out of the two-party system – those two parties may or may not decide to invite you to participate in their voting games, particularly during primary season.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I received my Los Angeles County voter information pamphlet in the mail and learned that while the Republicans, in fine conservative form, weren’t interested in us non-partisan types (of which there are nearly 800,000 – or nearly 1 in 5 of all voters—in LA County alone), the Democrats were more than happy to open their big tent.

How cool is that, I thought. Especially in this particular election, when the Clinton/Obama split has galvanized so many voters. Especially on this historically enormous and unifying voting day, when so many of us are voting all at once across the nation, and a ballot in a California presidential primary feels – for once-- like it might actually hold some sway.

I followed the instructions on my voter information mailer and told the lovely volunteer at my polling place that I wanted to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. She directed me to a voting booth that was labeled “DEM.” I cast my ballot, got my “I voted” sticker and left with a skip in my step: I’d done my civic duty and actually got to vote for somebody I think will be a decent president (certainly an improvement on what we’ve got now).

Then I turned on the radio, and learned that DTS voters (that’s “Decline To State”) in Los Angeles County needed to take one little extra step in order for their votes to count: They had to stamp a circle marked “Democrat” on their ballots. Otherwise the vote-counting machine would simply dump the ballot, without indicating that anything went wrong.

What?

I searched my memory: where was this circle? I don’t remember seeing it or being offered that option. I didn’t fill it in. My vote won’t count. (for more details on this outrage, see The California Majority: http://www.camajorityreport.com/index.php?module=articles&func=display&ptid=9&aid=2724)

Is there any feeling worse than knowing you've had the power to vote ripped out of your hands?