Now that the anniversary of the massacre is coming around, journalists and news anchors will naturally run as many stories about Littleton, Colorado as their audience can stand. They've already turned the massacre into an over-hyped morality play, with Violence In The Media cast as Satan and Cassie Bernall as a faithful Everygirl.
No one is content to let the tragedy lie, to let death be death and sorrow be sorrow. They'll squeeze every last possible drop of sentimentality out of the murders in order to improve ratings or sell an easily-written story;and,
to my discredit, i'm no different.
Nobody denies that the murders were a horrible tragedy. But compared to other events that were going on at the time, just how important was the Columbine massacre relative to the amount of media attention it received?
Consider what else was going on in the world at roughly the same time as the Columbine shootings. A bloody civil war was (and is) raging in Colombia; Clinton was bombing civilians in Serbia (while insisting that violence was no way to solve problems); women were (and are) being horribly oppressed in Afghanistan; and human slavery was (and still is) being practiced on a massive scale in war-torn Sudan. Hispanic and African-American students are shot almost every day, in school or out, as a result of gang activity fueled by ghettoization and the Drug War.
But apparently the suffering and death of thousands of brown people in far-away places - or at least white people who speak a different language - or even brown people in America's own inner cities - are less important than the deaths of upper-middle-class teenagers in a placid suburb. The reason, i think, is that so many middle-class Americans have grown desensitized to violence in the inner cities, and may never have cared about violence in other countries to begin with.
It is so seductively easy to draw a dividing line between Us and Them, between people who can drop dead by the thousands and people whose deaths actually matter; and the way the media handled the Littleton shootings clearly illustrated where that line has been drawn.
The Columbine massacre certainly aggravated adult prejudice against "outsiders" like Goths, but by no means created it. The masses of humanity, taken as a whole, are flighty: easily frightened and easily led, but not easily persuaded to think or question their assumptions; and the media circus that followed in the wake of the shootings only encouraged these tendencies.
The public perception that something must be somehow wrong with anyone who rejects mainstream consumer culture has existed from time immemorial - all Klebold and Harris did was to provide a focus, a pair of names, a rallying point for that prejudice and fear.
No longer are Goths mere "freaks" or "druggies;" now they're dangerous, alien, potential killers, the Enemies Of All That Is Good And Decent. Within days of the murders, school boards were rushing to ban black clothing, "vampire" makeup, and, of course, trenchcoats. In the name of preventing further violence, students who had previously been mere outcasts were suddenly being thought of as possible murderers, placed on official blacklists, and even suspended or expelled by overzealous administrators.
It was high-school McCarthyism - cultural Reefer Madness - a witch-hunt revised and updated for an age when superstition is sociological instead of religious - and it's only just begun.
Blaming Goths is good press and all; but restricting the blame to Goths doesn't provide enough sanctimony to go around, so self-appointed experts found it necessary to blame anything and everything else - especially movies, guns, video games, music, and the "Information Superhighway." If the Soviet Union were still around, the shootings would probably have been called a Communist plot.
The lengths to which pundits went to find safe targets for blame were absurd: Doom was talked about as if it were a training program for mayhem; The Matrix as if it were the killers' inspiration; and industrial music as if it were the soundtrack to the apocalypse.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn't kill those kids: no, sir, it was Marilyn Manson and Keanu Reeves. They weren't motivated by rage and frustration at a school system that was all wrong for them: no, they were motivated by Doom and Hollywood - or, failing that, one could always blame the Internet.
(Hell, everyone else is doing it.)
While Democrats called for more stringent gun control policies as the solution to school shootings, they faced strident opposition from conservatives; it seems unlikely, therefore, that the Columbine shootings will have much effect on gun control policy in the long term. After all, both Democrats and Republicans can always get together and blame Violence In The Media in a show of bipartisan unity.
But all this blame ignores the real problem. The problem isn't Marilyn Manson - the killers in Littleton didn't even like his music, and he's actually written a very insightful article about the phenomenon of school shootings. The problem isn't a lack of religion in teenagers' lives - the kid who shot up his school in Oklahoma came from "a very religious community." The problem isn't the imaginary lack of corporal punishment - the student who went on a rampage in Jonesboro had been paddled at school the day before he shot his classmates.
The problem is the public school system. Schools are more interested in teaching students how to take standardized tests than in educating them; students' knowledge of the world doesn't matter to them as much as federal funding. The length and color of students' hair is more important to administrators than the quality of instruction, and they're more interested in enforcing dress codes than in instilling a love of learning in a single young mind. Public schools reward conformity and obedience while punishing originality and individuality.
Some students are able to thrive in that kind of environment. Others, however - often, but not always, the most intelligent and talented - are not. Some in particular simply can't deal with the system, and to force it on them anyway causes only depression, alienation, and rage. A few of those alienated students will inevitably deal with their rage through violence.
Instead of punishing deviation from the norm or blacklisting students who display a hint of eccentricity, schools ought to be making themselves more flexible in order to accommodate teenagers who flourish in a more flexible and creative environment.
Whatever else Eric and Dylan were, they were not stupid. Who knows what good might have come of their lives if they'd been accepted, their talents nourished, their creativity encouraged? But instead, they were turned into mass murderers - by the very system that was supposed to mold them into productive human beings.
When the massacre happened, i had long since dropped out of high school and was doing well in my classes at a local community college. But when i heard about Dylan and Eric, what they were like, how brilliant and isolated they were, i thought:
That could have been me.
If my parents had forced me to stay at a high school where i was a square peg uninterested in the system's round holes, i might well have cracked one day and made the cover of Time.
Looking back now, i shiver when i consider that all the signs were there in my own life: i was precocious, shy, alienated from the mainstream of student culture. Conformity was agony to me, and still is. I drank straight Everclear out of squirt bottles and shoplifted dextromethorphan from Randall's. My friends and i pored over The Poor Man's James Bond, spent humid evenings building bombs in each other's garages, detonated them in weed-choked parking lots and unfinished houses.
I think of myself as a humane person: i'm virtually a complete pacifist; i've never been in a fight; i don't even eat animal products out of concern for the cows and chickens. But had things been a little different - well, there but for the grace of God went i.
Now one of my sisters is in high school, and the other one's in junior high. I'm at school a couple of hundred miles away from them, and i'll admit i worry about them sometimes.
The possibility exists - and will exist, and there's nothing i can do about it - that one of their classmates will go over the edge someday and bring his homemade arsenal to school. The more new restrictions they tell me about, the more ways their schools come up with to isolate and alienate the different, the more i worry.
There are small flames of anger burning in so many students' hearts, i want to say; how dare they throw gasoline on them when my sisters could get burned?
