Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Columbine … AfterthoughtsbyHikaru HirataIt has been fourteen months since the Columbine tragedy. I wasworking as a high school faculty member at the Shining Mountain WaldorfSchool in Boulder, Colorado. The three seniors from the Student Counciltook the initiative to offer a candle vigil the following morning. All the highschool students, the faculty, and the staff shared their grief and thoughts. Iwas glad that my students were “safe.”It is very easy to point the finger at the two students who causedthis incident; however, we must cut through the initial anger and outrageand get to the core of the “suffering souls” in the youths.Racism in the United StatesSince the incident took place on April 20, 1999, which is Hitler’sbirthday, the first thing that came to my mind is racial prejudice—the AryanSupremacy. Recently, as I am writing this article, racially motivated shootingstook place in Indiana. I was called a “Jap” by a group of public middleschool students in February 2000, here in Boulder. We all know about theslave trades, the slaughtering of the Native Americans, and anti-semitismin the United States, because those incidents are obvious and visible. RudolfSteiner was particularly against nationalism; he was not fond of PresidentWilson’s policies. I wonder how many of us are aware of what happenedat the Paris Convention in 1919. This meeting was initiated by PresidentWilson to establish the League of Nations. In this meeting, Nobuasa Makino,the delegate from Japan, proposed a racial equality policy on behalf of themany Japanese emigrants in the United States, who were subjected to prejudice.For instance, Japanese workers earned fifty cents per day while white288