(no subject)
Ten years ago today, I was sitting down to write a paper for my psychology class when I received a call from my best friend from high school. I was delighted to hear from her, as I hadn’t spoken to her since Christmas. But she wasn’t calling to chat. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “There’s been a shooting at Columbine.”
I remember stupidly asking which channel. But then again I never paid attention to these sorts of things, so how was I to know it would be on every channel? I also remember assuming it had to be a drive-by, with only a person or two injured or (inconceivably) killed. I never imagined it could be what it was. After that my memories get a little blurry.
It was ten years ago. Why is any of this important? Why am I not over it? For those of you who don’t know, I graduated from Columbine High School in 1998, approximately eleven months before the shootings. And I will never be completely over it.
Freshmen in college, even in their first week of classes, think they’re SO beyond high school. And I admit, it’s a huge thing to leave home and be fully responsible for one’s own life and education. But a year is not really a long time, as I learned that day. High school is not that far behind you. I spent four years of my life in that school. Even if you think you don’t care, even if you don’t want to care, a place becomes part of you when you’ve spent that much time there.
I didn’t know any people who died. I never had a class with Dave Sanders and I hadn’t the slightest passing acquaintance with any of the kids, including the shooters. My physics teacher was injured, and I knew a couple of people who were trapped in the building, though not well. But the people who died, the people who were injured, and the people who were traumatized weren’t the only casualties of that day. Columbine also died. It ceased to be the school I knew and became something else.
I went to a school like yours. There were cliques, sure. There was bullying. There was too much emphasis on sports and academics tended to fall by the wayside. There were nice kids and mean kids. There were “good” kids and “bad” kids. There were kids who were just trying to make it through and kids who thought they owned the school and, ergo, the world. And the only people who recognized the name of the school, other than the people who went there and their families, were the people in the Denver area whose schools competed against us.
The shootings changed that. Columbine as I knew it is gone. Now, it is a name that the majority of Americans (and quite a few foreigners as well) recognize. It’s a name that call of visions of blood and death, malice, godlessness, and evil. It’s a place where two boys became so twisted that they did the unthinkable (though I don’t suppose it’s that unthinkable anymore). It’s the warning - if it can happen here, in this pleasant suburban neighborhood, it can happen anywhere. It could be your children who die (though not your children who kill; no one ever thinks of that). It is the first thing that gets mentioned whenever there is a massacre. How does it compare to Columbine?
It will be a very, very long time before Columbine ceases to be associated with these images, if it ever is. Though I’m sure it’s not very different internally now than it was when I went there, my school is dead. People who don’t have a personal connection only see the exterior of Columbine - they see a symbol.
I don’t know a lot of details about what really happened. I never memorized the victims’ names. I never read the reports. I think it’s morbid. I know what I need to know. The rest is just unnecessary pain.
People try so hard to find someone or something to blame. It can’t really have been a typical suburban high school, they say. There must have been something different. These kids says there’s a group called the Trench Coat Mafia! It must be a vicious gang full of violent loners (a gang full of loners?)! The trench coats are black; maybe they worship Satan.
I remember that little trend. It started with some kids in my class. The trench coats were their own little way of being different together. Why trench coats? Trench coats have a certain concept that goes with them. Tortured detectives in film noir wear them. Mysterious figures, like Rorschach in Watchmen (which I’m reading right now), wear them. The black emphasizes the mysterious element. They wanted to feel like they had hidden depths that no one realized. Though they were really Clark Kents, they wanted to believe that deep down they were Batman (yes, I know I mixed my heroes; Bruce Wayne is too cool for this metaphor). Those people were harmless. I know. They were my friends. Not close ones, but still. We used to eat lunch together in a classroom in junior high, playing chess and designing our own X-men. There was no malice in them.
So the killers wore long coats to hide the guns. It doesn’t mean my friends were a gang instead of a group of kids who shared a clothing choice. It just means that people were desperate to come up with a reason. To make a senseless act make sense. People have blamed gangs, bullies, the school’s staff, video games, the internet, taking religion out of schools… it goes on and on. Some of these things I can’t speak to. Some of them I can.
There were no gangs at Columbine. There was bullying, I’m sure. I never experienced it in high school. I got more than my fair share in junior high. My parents always told me to ignore them and they’d leave me alone. That never worked in the short term, but by the time I got to high school I had learned to be invisible. They mostly left me in peace. But I know what it was like to be bullied, and I can say this: I hated the people who bullied me. With a fiery passion. I kind of still do. But though I might have killed some of them off in stories or fantasies - even considered that a solid unexpected pin-prick might make them leave me alone - I never lifted a finger against any of them. Being bullied sucks. But you deal. Of all the people who suffered in that school system, those two boys are the only ones who acted out. It wasn’t because of the bullying (though I admit it may have played a part). There had to be more to it than that.
We didn’t pray in school. The ten commandments weren’t posted on the walls. You don’t go to public school to learn right from wrong. Your parents are supposed to teach you that. Anyway, I don’t believe those boys didn’t know right from wrong (I’m sure their parents did teach them). They just didn’t care. People who are willing to do such a thing are not going to be stopped by being forced to mouth the Lord’s Prayer along with a loudspeaker every day. Not all kids at Columbine were Christians. I’m sure we had a wide range of religions, as well as some unbelievers (like, for instance, me). Any prayer would have alienated someone - and that is why God doesn’t belong in public schools.
The staff? They were decent. Some were better than others. The only truly harmful staff member I ever knew taught at the junior high and transferred to Columbine after the shootings. If one or both of the boys had him in junior high (and I don’t know if they did), I’ll buy that he might have contributed. I still want to see him pay for the way he treated some of us. But there would have been four years separating their time in his classroom and the shootings, and he was at a different school.
Should someone on the staff have recognized the threat? Ridiculous. Teachers at Columbine see two hundred kids a day. Some have behavioral problems. Some are goth - but everyone knows that’s just an affectation. How was anyone supposed to look at those two boys and realize that they would be the two who were a real threat? No, it wasn’t the teachers’ faults.
Who can we blame, then? The parents? Maybe, but I think it’s unfair. What it comes down to is this: It’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s fault. Them, and only them. They made choices. They made plans. They took actions. Everyone wants to know why. What made them do it? My answer: They chose to do it. No one wants to accept that - they want to punish someone, or to find a cause that they can fight or change. Make it harder to buy guns. Bring back prayer in school. Ban violent video games. They can’t touch the killers, and that’s frustrating, I understand. But trying to find a place to place blame so that they can feel that they’re doing something doesn’t help anyone in the end. It just keeps the hate and pain going.
The Columbine Memorial, which was dedicated a year, maybe a year and a half ago, has a section for each of the thirteen people killed, with a message from the victim’s family. Most are sad, but nice. But there is one that speaks with anger, bitterness, and bile of the “godless school” that allowed the tragedy to happen. It breaks my heart to see that the family of that student was never able to find peace or accept that there was no one but the killers to blame. They left engraved in stone a message of hate. When I visit the memorial, I try not to read that one; it arrests the healing.
I started writing this a week ago. I have so much in my head I need to say - and believe it or not, I’m not saying everything I want to. But I need to find my point. I need to figure out what’s the most important thing I want to say to the world, or at least my small LJ circle, on the tenth anniversary of the Columbine Massacre.
I’m angry.
Two newspaper editorials come to mind. The first was written by a close friend of mine, published in the community newspaper right after the kids went back to Columbine in the fall of 1999. She complained about the way the parents formed a lined path for them to enter through the first day of school. I was never quite sure what she was complaining about, except that the parents were chanting “We are Columbine.” It’s something we used to chant at assemblies (and probably sporting events; I don’t know because I never attended any) that had become something of a rallying cry in the aftermath of the shootings. I suppose she associated it with sports and used it as an excuse to complain about Columbine focusing on sports instead of academics. It was really just a forum to whine about how the school refused to send her Odyssey of the Mind team to the State Championships. She neglected to mention that she and several of her teammates did not actually attend Columbine and that the team wasn’t sponsored by the school, which I think is a legitimate reason to turn them down. I believe she intentionally didn’t mention that she was never a student at Columbine to give her complaints more weight. I was angry about that. Also, I thought it was tacky at her to launch a petty attack at the school at that particular point in time.
I was always iffy on this particular friend when it came to the shootings. I didn’t talk to her for several weeks after them, and when I did, I was kind of disgusted. She started right in on “You and I know why they did it. It’s because they were treated like we were.” (She was referring to junior high, which we attended together). There was a hard edge in her voice, and a tone that said there was a secret part of her that was glad that someone had gotten revenge on someone. I may be wrong about that, I suppose… she just never seemed to really get the horror of it.
I never told her how bothered I was by these things. Perhaps if I had, she’d still be my friend today.
The other newspaper editorial was written by a girl I knew casually through my musical theater company. She wrote to the Denver Post, identifying herself as a student from Columbine and begging the media to leave all of them alone - they just wanted to go back to their lives. She, like my friend, neglected to mention something - she hadn’t attended Columbine at the time of the shootings. She had transferred there later because “God told her she was needed there.” I suppose that’s possible. I suspect, though, that she just wanted the attention she could get by saying she went to Columbine. I believe that’s backed up by the fact she wrote a letter to the Post in which she spoke as if she had been there. And that’s what really gets me. That’s where the anger comes from.
So many people talk about Columbine like they know what they’re talking about. Psychologists and law enforcement and media personalities all go on and on and somehow we’re supposed to take in what they say, just like that. Even regular people I’ve met or worked with - they’ll say things about what it was like or why it happened with absolute authority. But they don’t know.
I will be the first to admit that I have no idea what it was like to be in the building on that day, or go through any of the experiences that the students that year and the next few years went through. I will never know. I will never know what it was like to be the parent or sibling of one of those kids. But I do know what it was like to be a student at Columbine in the years leading up to the shootings. I know exactly how bad it was - and how bad it wasn’t. So unless you have a piece of paper that says you graduated from Columbine or a current student ID, don’t tell me you know what it was like to go there. Tell me what it was like to be you that day, whoever you are and whatever background you come from. Ask me what it was like for me (that’s all I can know). But don’t tell me what it was like as if you know. It’s insulting.
The kids who will graduate from Columbine next month were eight years old when the shooting happened. They were in second grade. The freshman were five. They probably hardly remember April 20, 1999, and the days after. It staggers me - but time moves quickly when you’re young.
I was in Alpha Phi Omega (non-Greek community service fraternity) at CU in 1999. We decided to set up booths where we taught people to fold paper cranes. It was a symbol. It was something.
I didn’t know how to fold paper cranes. By the end of Thursday, April 22, I was an expert. I found it cathartic. I went to my parents’ house on Friday. They were on vacation, but I wanted to be close to the memorial service the next day, which was only a few miles from the house. I bought some origami paper on the way down. I put Star Wars in the VCR and watched the entire trilogy while I folded cranes until my fingers were raw from pressing the creases. It was all I could do.
By the end of the semester, we had more than three thousand cranes. I was personally responsible for hundreds of them.
I have been folding cranes for the past week, as I wrote this. My tear-off desk calendar has square pages, and I kind of like that they’re black and white. It seems appropriate. My feelings about the shooting are no longer bright and new. They’ve hardened over the past ten years to something stark and cold and hard. I don’t think about it that much, really. Sometimes I do. And when I get angry, it’s a bright white anger.
If you read these meditations, which I know are very long, I thank you. Sometimes one needs to get some stuff out. There’s more stuff. There’s always more stuff when I think about Columbine. But this was the important stuff. It’s a relief to put it out in the world.
And if you’ve gotten this far, and you have a spare moment, and you know how to fold an origami crane…