The Kauhajoki massacre

The school massacre in Kauhajoki this week has left Finland and the rest of Scandinavia in a state of shock and disbelief. It is hard to fathom what lead 22 years old Matti Juhani Saari to gun down nine of his fellow students and one teacher before putting the gun to his own head.

There has been many explanations put forth for this tragic episode. As expected, the usual suspects, the internet and Finland's lax gun laws have been pointed to first. Saari was very active on the internet, where he showed a very keen interest in guns. And unlike from his normal contact with other people, he also showed his darker sides on the net. On example of this is the video clips he put out on YouTube shortly before the shootings. Partly due to Finland's hunting traditions, obtaining a gun is very easy in Finland.

Hege Ulstein of Dagsavisen has also pointed to Finland's school system as one of the culprits. Finland has received much praise for its high results in international surveys and tests, such as the PISA-tests. Her argument is that because Finland does not prioritize social skills training as much as Norway, Finland would be more prone to such tragedies. This is a highly speculative argument in my mind.

It is true that the Norwegian syllabus contains a very high emphasis on social skills, which is very good. Whether it succeeds to reach the goals could be discussed, but the emphasis is nevertheless important. To argue that because we put focus on social skills that we are immune to such tragedies is highly dubious. We only need to think back a couple of months to find an incident that could have turned really nasty, when a barrister fired a gun into a reception center for asylum seekers and seriously injured a 16 years old Somalian. Fortunately, we have been spared of tragedies of the scope of the Kauhajoki massacre (knock on wood). But to hold that we for various reasons are somehow immune to that would be to fool ourselves.

The thoughts of a third world child…….LONGEVITY!

A guest post by Sevika Stensby

I remember, when I moved to Norway several years ago, feeling in total awe of my new home and how much regard they had for their nation. The social welfare here is probably second to none.

Within a very short period of time my Norwegian husband and I invested in our first apartment together. It was a completely unambitious bid on a very basic, old apartment...pretty much like most people here start out, 72sqm (one fourth of a house containing 4 apartments of equal size) of our very own space…we had great ambitions to renovate it completely ourselves. Needless to say, the extreme DIY culture here was also nothing short of amazement for me.

Within an incredibly short space of time it became apparent that all 3 neighbours in the house had lived in the house since it was built in 1954. They were by this time all pensioners and well into the years of the senior citizen.

We were a young strong couple that had just moved in, they saw the obvious advantages of this. The grass, that you can pretty much sit and watch physically grow here in the summer season due to everything being so accelarated (the summers are 2 months long at best), needed to be clipped regularly. Our elderly neighbours had neither the strength nor the interest in their part of the obligation. This naturally fell on our shoulders. Our summers were consumed with lawnmowing and gardening of which I in all my life had not seen the like (ofcourse in South Africa we all have gardener or even two to take care of this, never having to spare a thought for how one acquires a pretty garden).

The families of these seniors living in the building never seemed to visit, or at least with no real regularity. They seemed thrilled that there was a child in the house and within the first month of moving in my 5 year old had 4 pairs of wool socks. They also were keen on inviting me over to coffee as frequently as possible. I often accepted and sat through hours of coffee drinking and cake eating (I gained 10kg in my first year here). My Norwegian lessons had also started in earnest.

The families of these seniors never seemed to visit. My daughter was regularly invited upstairs for traditional Norwegian dinners to the point that it became a normal programme.

The families of the seniors never seemed to visit. I would walk across the hall to Ruth with baked goods and listen for hours as she cried about her aches and pains and loneliness since the death of her husband several years before. My heart broke each and every time.

The families of these seniors never seemed to visit. Summer came again and my child was taken on her first trip to the nearby waterwonderland, not by me but by by the active 75 year old neighbour upstairs. She had grandchildren, they could not make it.

Norway has an admirable health policy regarding active seniors. Their desire is for the seniors to make use of the resources they have to live a more active life. They also want to encourage them to live at home for as long as they possibly can. There are several challenges for innovation brought on by the incredible longevity we witness here in Norway as opposed to Africa, where the population is increasingly younger. Challenges for the health care sector are the most predominant.
The resources provided seem extravagant to the third world child that I am. Home assistance as often as one requires it! The struggle for manpower in the health care sector, however, creates an even bigger challenge. Those working as home assistants to the aged have barely enough time to reach all those seniors they need to see in a day for the delivery of a meal or getting them into a shower, how are they possibly to spare the time for a chat.

Nursing homes, another great offer the health care sector provides the aged, are also understaffed to the degree that the assistants there have plenty to do just doling out medication and taking care of the visit to the toilet. They simply don't have the time or capacity for the social aspect of caring for the aged.

Where are the families of these people?

At home in South Africa, needless to say, there is no social welfare of any significance. Specifically within the Indian community, it is a very common and natural thing that when the grandparents get old they move in with either a daughter or a son or have medium term stays with all their children on a rotational basis. There is care from both sides. Grandparents are actively contributing to the home in various ways. They are involved with the children and there is a general feeling of having people around who care about your well-being.
In today's world, there needs to be a double-income to survive and educate your kids. Having grandma at home also helps working mom and dad.
As grandparents grow older and need more physical help their children and grandchildren are there to give them all the support they need. They live a full and purposeful life right until they take their last breath. They are loved and cared for and never have to feel lonely.
I lived a life like this with my grandma. I still have fond memories of the old stories she told me and all the culture and tradition she passed on to me. I would not choose to have it any other way.

My husband, by comparison, barely visited his grandparents on the maternal side. They were strangers that lived in an old age home. The first and last time I saw them was a month before they died and we then attended their funeral. What their everyday was like I will never know.

On the paternal side, I insisted that we visit every weekend as we lived in the same town. Grandma there was tired of living alone and desperate for it all to be over and done with even when I entered the picture. She felt that she was cursed with good health and didn't think that purely wishing herself dead would take the pain of loneliness away. She lived at home and enjoyed good health until she died at the age of 95, truly as desired by the health policy.

Many may argue that this is not the norm. I have, however, witnessed far too much of this in Norway to agree. It seems to me to be more the norm than an exception.

What is so wonderful about living such a long life then? Why is it such a proud fact that we have such longevity figures? Do we know what this means for the elderly on an everyday basis? Do families here forget that they have a social and familial responsibility that falls outside the health policy of the country?

Does having an excess of wealth and the ability to provide such resources to the nation also have a negative impact on the social responsibilities of the individual? Meaning, has it become such that because we belive that our elderly are economically provided for we don't have to worry about anything else at all?

To some degree I even understand euthanasia. I am not saying that I advocate it, just that I understand it!

Skills and aimless university students...

On my way to work today, listening to the radio in my car, I got to think of something that I have noticed while living here in the UK. Whenever there's talk of education and training, it is very much focused on acquiring skills. Using this word in the way it is used here, it seems that it is a strong emphasis on acquiring very palpable, tangible skills that can immediately be put into use in a work situation.

Maybe it is just me, coming from the more academic end of education in Norway, but it seems we do not have that strong an emphasis on actually getting palpable skills that we can use in a work situation. Going to the university in Norway, this aspect of education was very far back in the minds of myself and most of my study buddies. Hearing all the talk of skills here now, I kind of feel that I should have been much more aware of that during my study years. Wandering about in the corporate world, I do not feel that my skills are particularly marketable.

Norway's got some very good financing schemes for education, and anyone that wants to can have any education they want - given that they fulfill the enrollment criteria. This easy access to getting the education you want leads many students to take into account their own interests more than what would be sure to lead to a job later. According to some numbers I read a while ago, Norway's got more than 200.000 students in higher education at any time. That is a pretty high number for such a small country.

There is of course nothing wrong with going into an education that interests you. There is much to be said in defense of that. But there is a limit to how many historians, sociologists and creative artists we can use. I think that if more young students really thought through their choice of education, we would have seen a change in what they do study. A lot of them would have chosen another type of education than going to the university altogether. Many of the students hanging around at the universities are there either because their buddies are there or because they really don't know what which education they want to get. Instead of wandering aimlessly around the university in search of some interesting lectures, it might have been better for many of those to choose an education that would get them some hard skills that could be put into use in actual work.

For myself, it's not so much that I regret going to the university as such. On the whole, I think that was the right choice for me. But if I would have started over and done it again, I would have kept much more focus on making my degree more marketable by choosing more carefully the subjects of which it is made up.

Turning with the populist wind on immigration?

FrP (The Progress Party) has steadily gained on the opinion polls in the past years. According to some polls, it is now larger than Ap (The Labour Party). With the growth of FrP, the other parties will inevitably have to take it more seriously than what has been the case in the past. The rise of FrP has long been something that has kept many an Ap-politician awake at night.

There are two ways that the parties on the center-left stage can respond to the ascent of FrP. For one, they can try to capture voters by launching policies that resemble the most popular policies on the right. Alternatively, they can further emphasize their left-of-center position, and try to educate the public of the follies of many of FrP's suggestions.

Although e.g. the leader of SV (the Socialist Left Party), Kristin Halvorsen, has stuck her head far down in the ground and claims the opposite, it seems that the population is drifting right in their support for political parties. The opinion polls show this trend quite clearly.

If the growth of the parties on the right could pull the other parties slightly towards the right, that could in my mind be a positive thing. For example, if it could soften up the stiff resistance to anything that smacks of privatization, I would welcome that very much. That would not be the case if it happens in the more populistic areas, like immigration or spending of the oil fund money. And that is precisely my fear, and something we might have seen signs of recently with Ap toughening up it's stance on immigration.

Even though we need to shoulder our responsibility when it comes to accepting refugees from conflict-ridden areas, there also needs to be limits to immigration. We cannot simply open our borders up and accept anyone and everyone. A small society like Norway simply does not have the capacity to deal with too many immigrants and refugees. The last couple of years, Norway have received from 5.000 to 6.500 asylum seekers annually. Recent research suggests that asylum seekers, especially young ones, are being very well integrated and that they are not any unreasonable burden on the Norwegian society (i.e. welfare state). This confirms that Norway is perfectly capable of absorbing this number of refugees.

Our Prime Minister's tightening up of immigration rules was based on estimates that we could be faced with a more than doubling of the number of asylum seekers next year. It could be debated whether we would be able to responsibly absorb that many. But if this is a trend towards a more populistic line from Ap, that would be very, very sad. To abandon responsible policies is not good at all, and if Ap and the other serious political parties start doing so, that is not good for anyone. It should be left alone to FrP to try to score cheap political points by suggesting irresponsible and/or reckless policies.