Finland? They have guns and YouTube there?

I’ve always been in a fog about Finland. Ever since Bob Dylan sang "If you're travellin' in the north country fair, where the winds hit heavy on the borderline," I imagined northern countries like Finland, rugged and tender places where people loved and lived better than most of us. I imagined wholesome Finlanders, Liam Neeson-esque, carrying oil-burning lanterns out to the seawall to watch for ships on windy nights. They chopped wood and sat by the fire in the evenings, reading the classics, eating fresh herring and swilling vodka temperately. The Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the Helsinki Citizens Assembly were just vague terms to me, unschooled in Finland’s noble history, its current social successes, its struggles, its actual presence. And anyway, isn't Dylan’s north country just a state of mind that we all have shared, where love flows freely in the howling winds?

I got a sharp awakening about Finland from the Aki Kaurismaki film “The Man Without A Past” a few years ago. It’s a startlingly odd and quirky film, starring a startlingly odd and endearing actor named Markku Peltola, about very modern people living in destitution in old shipping containers on a beach in Finland. It shows off the Finnish coolness factor while telling a bittersweet and universal story about the plight and redemption of disaffected and disenfranchised people.

This week in Finland, after giving some indication of his intent via YouTube, a disturbed teenager has killed seven students, the principal and himself in a school shooting that will draw the world’s attention to that distant latitude, and remind us of other shootings that have scarred us so deeply already. The debate will arise in earnest about personal expression, YouTube, our media-driven society and the universality of school shootings.

When I was young, we had air raid drills in school when we had to hide under our desks to practice for a time when the Russians might bomb us. But they never did, we were just being extra careful. It was scary, and actually hopeless, but we felt smug and self-sufficient as we folded our 50 pound bodies into safe little lumps, covered our heads with our skinny little arms and waited for the roof to cave in.

Now in schools, kids have Code C drills, when they have to practice what they will do if a shooter comes down the halls and kills some of them. This they know for sure can happen at any time, because it’s on the news again and again, and many of them have seen the media images. A quick look at Wikipedia’s entry under “School Shootings” shows dozens of incidents of killers gone berserk in the last twenty years.

Dialogue will reach a fevered pitch in the weeks to come about the Finnish teenager’s use of YouTube to post threatening tirades before his rampage. Where does the fault lie? What are the common denominators between Columbine, Virginia Tech, Nickel Mines and so many others? What is really going wrong? How could it happen in the north country fair?