Bowling for Columbine: An Eye-Opener

America is the superpower of the world. As a first-world country, people always dream of migrating there to get a better education, a better job, and a better life. Even if it means being away from one’s family, or risking one’s life in dangerous cities like New York or Los Angeles, people are willing to make these sacrifices just to make it in the land of opportunity.

However, America has a darker side that not everyone wants to accept. While America has offered countless opportunities to thousands of people migrating from third-world countries, it has also killed thousands, if not millions, of people through the many wars it has raged against countries like Vietnam, Kuwait, Yugoslavia, and Iraq. People who harbor a very jaded opinion of America usually take to calling the American presidents “war-freaks”.

It is ironic that while America is so bent on controlling the affairs outside of their country, violence happens in their own backyard, to their own people. To make sense of this, the documentary Bowling for Columbine poses an interesting thesis: could it be that the “war-freak tendencies” of American presidents have set an example for today’s American youth? Such a premise would explain the senseless killings in Columbine High School, but it seems to be a premise least explored. Americans blame everything and everyone but the President: violent video games, easy access to guns and ammunition, and even Marilyn Manson.

Michael Moore has researched on these reasons, only to discover that such influences are not unique to America. Throughout the world, people watch violent movies, play violent video games, and listen to Marilyn Manson. Yet as the documentary’s statistics show, the number of people who die of gun-inflicted violence in America are thousands more than those in other countries. There must be something unique to America that can explain all this violence.

The documentary looks at a culture of fear, racism, and poverty as possible answers, all of which are actually evidence of a lack of good governance. According to the UNDP article on good governance and sustainable development, good governance “promotes, supports, and sustains human development”, which in turn has five aspects: empowerment, cooperation, equity, sustainability, and security.

The culture of fear reflects how Americans feel a lack of security in their own country. In sharp contrast to the Canadians who can even sleep at night with their doors unlocked, Americans have three locks on their doors and sleep with a gun under their pillows. They have even lost faith in the ability of law-enforcement agencies to protect them, hence they feel the need to protect themselves and their own neighbor. The easy access to guns and ammunition only supports such a need for self-protection.

Racism shows how America lacks equity among its people, as it has throughout its history. Although comical, the documentary’s animated version of America’s history has shown that Americans have long been afraid of one another. It is ironic that while most crime suspects are always African-American or Latin-American males, the perpetrators of the Columbine killings were young white males. Because of this racism, cooperation between races thus becomes difficult. This bigotry only reinforces, then, the culture of fear that is already abound.

Poverty shows how sustainability and empowerment are lacking in the country. Michael Moore has clearly shown how poverty is a factor in violence: how can a mother keep watch of her children and make sure they grow up with the right values if she has to work two jobs just to make ends meet? If a mother cannot take care of her own family, how much more can she participate in the decision-making processes of a nation?

All these show, then, that as much as America is seen as a land of countless opportunity, of progress and development, it has not achieved the ideal form of governance: a participatory democracy. It has not empowered its people enough to have them directly participate in politics.

But perhaps Michael Moore represents one step in this direction. The American constitution protects freedom of speech, thus enabling the filmmaker to create a documentary that will explore the roots of America’s problem with violence, as well as express his sentiments about the matter. In using the mass media to bring forth his message, perhaps more people will be forced to reflect on the state of America, and empower them to speak their minds just as he has done through the documentary.

Personally, I admire the cause that Michael Moore has taken up in his documentary because it is an eye-opener, especially for people who have seen America through rose-colored glasses. Many of the people who have been victims of violence are ordinary people whose voices are seldom heard. But the assistance Michael Moore gave to two victims of Columbine who wanted to bring forth their request that K-Mart stop selling ammunition, and the interview he conducted with the head of the National Rifle Association to try to do something about the death of a five-year-old girl, such acts represent the kind of influence everyday people can have, if only they are given a means through which they can properly channel this influence. Bowling for Columbine has given these everyday people a voice, no matter how small it may be for now.

Although the Philippines is a third-world country and America is the world’s superpower, both countries have certain things in common: the need to empower their people, and the need to develop systems of good governance. Just like the Americans, the Filipinos also seem to suffer from a culture of fear, very evident in the content of our news on television and print media. Majority of the population lives below the poverty line, and there is a clear divide between rich and poor. The statistics of gun-inflicted violence in the Philippines may not have been included in Bowling for Columbine, but the high rate of crime manifests the same problem: the lack of good governance.

The documentary, then, is relevant even to us Filipinos because it gives us a means of diagnosing our own problems. We would not have thought that the Philippines and America could be similar, especially since they seem to belong to opposite ends of the spectrum. But violence is just as prevalent in America as it is in the Philippines. And if Michael Moore has found a possible explanation to America’s problems, perhaps we Filipinos can also be inspired to try to address our own problems.

The challenge for both America and the Philippines is to establish a system of good governance that will allow people to participate freely in the political system, allowing them to live democracy as a way of life.