1999 Entry (Carnage in Littleton Pt. 2)

When I was only 13 years old, I was the victim of some pretty cruel bullying at my school. Life became so unbearable that, at one point, I choked down a bottle of non-prescription sleeping pills in hopes that I’d never have to face this any more. It didn’t work — didn’t even make me sick, just a little sleepy. But the day stays in my mind and the cruelty of my ‘schoolmates’ left scars on my heart that remain there today. I was never more aware of this than my first reaction to hearing about the Littleton shootings.

I don’t approve of people killing other people in a rage of revenge, but I understand it. The news spoke of how the boys targeted the jocks and popular kids and a small voice in my head said, “Well, at least they targeted right.” Not a pretty reaction, I know, and it shook me up just to realize I thought that. But after an initial denial to myself, I finally decided to explore the being who applauded the thought of the “snotty kids” getting blown away.

Now that I’ve gone the full way with my thoughts, it strikes me that these shootings are going to continue until we realize we need to teach our children kindness. It’s not just a phase that kids pass through in adolesence that makes them torment other kids. It’s just plain cruelty being allowed and sometimes even encouraged in our schools and often in our homes. The cute kids who are bright spontaneous and who do well in school and sports are well-loved by teachers, parents, and peers. They’re the winners.

The kids whose self-esteem has been eroded by poor parenting end up victimized by fellow students and these depressed teens are the people least able to handle teasing and persecution.

In seventh grade a bunch of girls trapped me in the sewing room and threatened to stick needles in me. I remember daydreaming about killing them, not in a very realistic way but in a sort of superhero way. I doubt I would have done anything violent if only because I couldn’t have wanted to endure the consequences, but I imagined it and that’s how these things start. In a perverse sort of way, I can believe that if I had killed these girls they would have brought it on themselves. And that’s what I feel happened at Columbine Highschool.

What hits hardest is that the kids who got nailed at Columbine were not necessarily the ones that “deserved” it. Eric and Dylan didn’t necessarily shoot the “right” kids. From what I’ve read and heard, it sounds like the teens that got shot just happened to end up taking the brunt of what some other kids “had coming to them.” (I put some of these things in quotes because no kid really deserves death and bullets but I’m sure some will be appalled anyway.) The trouble is, since parents and schools aren’t teaching kindness and courtesy (and, Lord knows, NOBODY can learn it from TV), kids are sort of teaching it. Maybe NOW some teens aren’t bullying weaker peers because somewhere in the back of their minds they’re thinking that other kid might end up shooting them. There’s got to be a healthier way for us to achieve this,though.

Every day teachers see cruelty going on in their schools and often they overlook it because they favor the more popular students. No wonder kids shoot them! Kids pick on other kids like Lord of the Flies and even the kids that are used to being picked on will join those “higher on the food chain” when someone “lower” is in the hotseat. I’m surprised these kinds of murders didn’t start much earlier.

So far we haven’t heard about girls doing this — we girls tend to kill or harm ourselves instead — but it won’t be long, I’m convinced, before women’s lib raises its head here too. I feel the rage in me when I read about the other kids telling Eric and Dylan they should “get married” and when I hear that other kids would walk by and shove them into lockers. I completely identify with the two marking pictures in the yearbook as “dead” and “save.” And you know what’s really going to encourage the next killer? The fact that Eric and Dylan are no longer looked on as dorky now. They’re seen with that horrified respect we give the infamous. We want to know everything we can about them. With morbid curiousity we read the dark things they wrote on their website and we listen to their former acquaintances discuss the guys’ behavior at the bowling alley. With a shudder we realize they walked among us just like “regular” people do. And someplace there are teens in pain who see Eric and Dylan as having moved from dorky unwanted status to being remembered forever and finally given a bizarre sort of respect. Is it worth dying for? Well, to a teen who is already convinced suicide is the only way out, why not take some of those you hate with you? If Eric and Dylan had done a double suicide, people’s lives would have gone on and the two would have been remembered as those screwed up kids who killed themselves. At the same time, there would be those who would secretly think it was no big loss to society since the two of them were such “lowlifes” anyway. The way these two actually went out, however, leaves them as the secret heroes of the perverse and the horror of the ‘upright.’ And I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of all adults… all adults from ages 21-100. We’re so worried about civil liberties and freedom of expression and no religion in the schools that we completely overlook the evil that breeds in the hallways every day.

So, Eric and Dylan killed a few kids and a teacher? It was just reciprocation. They had been the victims of murder by erosion each and every day when they were sent into a culture that allowed words to slice to the core of their souls and destroy them so completely they were able to commit a crime so horrible it was splashed across front pages everywhere. No one was there to report on the crime of the jocks shoving them. No one pointed accusatory fingers and harsh words at the girls who ribbed them, saying they were gay. Each day little murders occurred in the hallways until Eric and Dylan were so dead they were able to live the fantasy that was grown and cultured at Columbine Highschool and every adult that allowed it to happen, and every child who contributed to the misery should be held more accountable than the two poor saps that gave up their lives to exact revenge.