As if this massacre wasn’t heartbreaking enough, another mass shooting around the capital just two days later, perpetrated by a 21-year-old, left eight dead, including a 15-year-old boy. It was a bloody week and the public is left with some very grim questions.
Although Serbia has one of the world's highest gun ownership rates per capita — an estimated 39 privately-owned guns for every 100 citizens makes Serbia the third-ranked country globally in this statistic, behind the United States and Yemen — Serbia has very strict gun laws and shootings here, in general, were extremely rare.
So how did so many happen under such dramatic circumstances? Left leaning liberals were quick to point the finger at Serbia’s legacy from the 1990s Yugoslav wars. But the perpetrators of all these crimes were born in Western-oriented Serbia, long after the wars had ended. They grew up on American movies, playing video games and using social media.
Immediately following the school shooting, 45,000 children (and counting) took to their TikToks to celebrate the young shooter, starting a profile calling the shooter a ‘king’, glorifying his deeds and making fun of his victims. Even as I’m writing this, it seems too surreal for me, but it’s true. How did so many of our kids lose all sense of empathy?
For years, I’ve been a vocal advocate of education reform & investment in culture in Serbia. Reality television programs in the country have created a popular culture that celebrates decadent values, from prostitution to crime. Whenever a well-known ‘former criminal’, Kristijan Golubovic hits the streets, he is besieged by kids asking him for an autograph. He recently filmed a music video at a Belgrade school, with the school’s permission.
At the same time, TikTok reigns supreme among our youths. This Chinese-owned social media platform is banned in China, where a ‘child-safe’ version called Douyin operates, but is wildly popular among children in Western countries. TikTok challenges is already the cause of numerous deaths, while its short content model is fostering a lazy populace devoid of a meaningful attention span.
All this is happening during rapidly changing times when most of our children, when they grow up, will be tasked with jobs that, right now, do not exist. This is a major challenge for our education system, which currently seems to be most successful at creating obedient workers & consumers. People who think too much are a threat to the system. This leads to countries being led by politicians who are incompetent at worst or mediocre at best.
So what are our children being taught by popular culture nowadays? That they have a lot of rights, but little to no obligations. That the successful ones are those who stop at nothing to gain riches. That fame is to be attained at any cost, regardless of whether it’s for doing something positive or negative. The media have informed us a lot about murderous mass killers, but can we list the name of at least one mass shooting victim?
The neoliberal dogma has created the perfect storm in which only individualist interprerations of world events are permitted, while the very existence of society as a concept is being disputed. This leads us to every discussion about what’s good for society being labelled as an attack on our individual freedoms. Freedom doesn’t mean anyone can do whatever they want, but that nobody has to do something they don’t want to. And this is something kids nowadays largely don’t understand, nor do many of their parents.
I’m not against new technologies, nor do I believe we have to resort to repressive measures to achieve social change, but we need to open up to these discussions and do more to protect our children. The fact that our values have become so far removed from traditional ones may not be a good thing. Every nation’s history has dark stains, but the argument that respecting any idea that existed in the past is a retrograde flow — doesn’t float.
We, thus, have to slow down a notch. We live in times of permanent acceleration — eat faster, drink faster, work faster, earn faster, spend faster, live faster, die faster. Many folks just can’t take it and rightfully so. We can’t expect our children to enjoy or value life if there’s no time to do so. We can’t expect them to learn about values if we have no time to talk to them.
Our children have already started talking to artificial intelligence chatbots. This may be our last chance to reach out to them and try to create a better world together. Before humanity is sucked out of them for good.
Boris Malagurski