"There's Fennel For You...and Columbines"
Today is the sixth anniversary of Columbine. An event which, despite the fact that I was in my last year of college at the time, became a hinge to my life before and my life after.
Call me cynical, but I've been troubled by the media undersaturation and lack of scapegoating in the Red Lake incident. How many times did Ted Koppel and his ilk cut to Cassie Bernall's lovely blonde visage and remind us sanctimoniously that "she said yes"? And isn't it about time blogging - which we all know is as dangerous as inviting a sex offender into your bedroom - got blamed for something big?
Somehow, on April 20, 1999, although I didn't have a TV or a computer, I knew all about Columbine. This time, when I saw that trigger-phrase "school shooting" in the Google News lineup I was shocked - not so much because it had happened, but because it had happened several days earlier, because I felt a discombobulated shame at being so out of the loop for the deaths of 10 people. One click later: oh. It was on the Rez. Dismally, I imagined that if the kid had only killed one or two people, it wouldn't have even registered on America's "won't somebody please think of the children?" radar.
But I'm not going to write about race and class inequities here - a) I'll leave that to other people and b) I fancy my small coterie of readers to be pretty enlightened on those things anyway. I just got a sharp bout of the bitterness that must be voiced. What's more, the whole thing has exhumed some internal junk of mine that got set in motion six years ago, but which has been around far longer.
Some say that Columbine was the defining event in the lives of the Millennial Generation. I'm not a Millennial, but I've thought about it every day since. When I was in grad school I scrounged OhioLINK for every book written about Columbine - I found books about the victims, I found books casting the event in a pointedly Christian light, but I didn't find any written by people who felt quite like I did.
After people started talking about Red Lake, a couple of my Boomer coworkers, tsking at the tragedy of it all and lamenting how "things aren't like what they used to be", asked me if I'd ever worried about that kind of thing happening at my school. Columbine happened when I was finishing college, and neither had I been a teen for Pearl, Mississippi or Paducah or Kip Kinkel. Maybe school shootings were after my time. "I guess not," I answered noncommittally.
Then a few hours later the real memory of high school squeezed messily out of its repression. Of course I wasn't worried about that kind of thing happening, I was too busy gleefully imagining it.
Now before you say "who is this psychopath with a Really Bad Cleveland Accent?" I want to point out the five things that kept me from ever actually doing anything worse than skipping gym to hide out at the public library:
1. An actual respect for human life.
2. A deep-seated fear and aversion to publicly humiliating my parents. Only my sister knows completely how Mad Mom = Definite Bad Juju, and she was smart enough to marry a man who lived on another continent.
3. The fact that I wouldn't know how to use a slingshot, let alone toss out a few dozen rounds from a firearm of the most heinous, illegally obtained variety.
4. A firmly entrenched self-centeredness. One might think this would make me care less about the consequences of my would-be rampage, but the thought of spending the rest of my life in prison for offing a bunch of dumb jocks who surely wouldn't be able to make the world a better place (like I would be able to, of course) didn't seem very sensible.
5. Creativity, innovation, and a runaway imagination. Yes, all those virtues that kept showing up on my kindergarten report cards - in spite of consistently "needing improvement" in "being a team player" - truly paid off. As many teens ultimately discover about sex, daydreaming about it is much better and doesn't get you in any trouble.
That said, kids can ruin each others' lives. I am always troubled by those who think of children as sweet, innocent little lambs who know not what they do. Have these people ever worked with children? Have these people ever even seen children? Weren't they children themselves, or did they just hatch fully formed and smug from some pious, otherworldly egg? Perhaps we need a culture-wide shift back to the 19th century mindset that children are inherently evil and must be "corrected" with character education.
There must be other adults that feel like I do. That don't condone what the school shooters do, but understand exactly what motivates it. I'm not talking about those adults who clamor for anti-bullying programs. I mean those among us who nursed a silent, fierce, abject hate for our peers, and not without good reason.
I do acknowledge that it is hard as an adult to remember that kids' lives are serious. Now in my late twenties, I've realized that I'm mostly over adolescence. Which means I'm in a dangerous spot: as someone who works with teens, it would be irresponsible to let myself forget that giant splatter of dark, sick misery that a lot of kids live in.
Because I lived in it too.
Call me cynical, but I've been troubled by the media undersaturation and lack of scapegoating in the Red Lake incident. How many times did Ted Koppel and his ilk cut to Cassie Bernall's lovely blonde visage and remind us sanctimoniously that "she said yes"? And isn't it about time blogging - which we all know is as dangerous as inviting a sex offender into your bedroom - got blamed for something big?
Somehow, on April 20, 1999, although I didn't have a TV or a computer, I knew all about Columbine. This time, when I saw that trigger-phrase "school shooting" in the Google News lineup I was shocked - not so much because it had happened, but because it had happened several days earlier, because I felt a discombobulated shame at being so out of the loop for the deaths of 10 people. One click later: oh. It was on the Rez. Dismally, I imagined that if the kid had only killed one or two people, it wouldn't have even registered on America's "won't somebody please think of the children?" radar.
But I'm not going to write about race and class inequities here - a) I'll leave that to other people and b) I fancy my small coterie of readers to be pretty enlightened on those things anyway. I just got a sharp bout of the bitterness that must be voiced. What's more, the whole thing has exhumed some internal junk of mine that got set in motion six years ago, but which has been around far longer.
Some say that Columbine was the defining event in the lives of the Millennial Generation. I'm not a Millennial, but I've thought about it every day since. When I was in grad school I scrounged OhioLINK for every book written about Columbine - I found books about the victims, I found books casting the event in a pointedly Christian light, but I didn't find any written by people who felt quite like I did.
After people started talking about Red Lake, a couple of my Boomer coworkers, tsking at the tragedy of it all and lamenting how "things aren't like what they used to be", asked me if I'd ever worried about that kind of thing happening at my school. Columbine happened when I was finishing college, and neither had I been a teen for Pearl, Mississippi or Paducah or Kip Kinkel. Maybe school shootings were after my time. "I guess not," I answered noncommittally.
Then a few hours later the real memory of high school squeezed messily out of its repression. Of course I wasn't worried about that kind of thing happening, I was too busy gleefully imagining it.
Now before you say "who is this psychopath with a Really Bad Cleveland Accent?" I want to point out the five things that kept me from ever actually doing anything worse than skipping gym to hide out at the public library:
1. An actual respect for human life.
2. A deep-seated fear and aversion to publicly humiliating my parents. Only my sister knows completely how Mad Mom = Definite Bad Juju, and she was smart enough to marry a man who lived on another continent.
3. The fact that I wouldn't know how to use a slingshot, let alone toss out a few dozen rounds from a firearm of the most heinous, illegally obtained variety.
4. A firmly entrenched self-centeredness. One might think this would make me care less about the consequences of my would-be rampage, but the thought of spending the rest of my life in prison for offing a bunch of dumb jocks who surely wouldn't be able to make the world a better place (like I would be able to, of course) didn't seem very sensible.
5. Creativity, innovation, and a runaway imagination. Yes, all those virtues that kept showing up on my kindergarten report cards - in spite of consistently "needing improvement" in "being a team player" - truly paid off. As many teens ultimately discover about sex, daydreaming about it is much better and doesn't get you in any trouble.
That said, kids can ruin each others' lives. I am always troubled by those who think of children as sweet, innocent little lambs who know not what they do. Have these people ever worked with children? Have these people ever even seen children? Weren't they children themselves, or did they just hatch fully formed and smug from some pious, otherworldly egg? Perhaps we need a culture-wide shift back to the 19th century mindset that children are inherently evil and must be "corrected" with character education.
There must be other adults that feel like I do. That don't condone what the school shooters do, but understand exactly what motivates it. I'm not talking about those adults who clamor for anti-bullying programs. I mean those among us who nursed a silent, fierce, abject hate for our peers, and not without good reason.
I do acknowledge that it is hard as an adult to remember that kids' lives are serious. Now in my late twenties, I've realized that I'm mostly over adolescence. Which means I'm in a dangerous spot: as someone who works with teens, it would be irresponsible to let myself forget that giant splatter of dark, sick misery that a lot of kids live in.
Because I lived in it too.
posted by Christine Borne at 6:47 PM
2 Comments:
I lived in it, too, and your post articulated so well what I've tried to say in the past.
Recently discussing said school shooting with a coworker, I said something like "I completely understand what would motivate a student to off a classmate or two." Imagine that coming from a 39-year-old, 5'2" woman, and the look of shock on my coworker's face...
No, it wasn't something I worried about much during those dark years, but looking back, it should have been.
I know exactly what you mean.
I often think how lucky I am to have graduated high school before Columbine, not because I am worried that I might have been shot, but because I can easily see myself or any one of my friends being hounded into the ground for being Weird Kids (Who Might Kill Us All).
The thing that worries me about Columbine backlash is that it seems to have simply reinforced the idea that strange kids are somehow evil, instead of shedding life on how horrible life can be for kids who are different or abused or hurting in some quiet, dangerous way.
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