Something has been kind of bugging me, and I have to get it out.
I have now seen the Columbine High School shooting referred to in a newsgroup as “a terrorist attack” (by conservatives claiming that the Clinton administration was “soft on terror”…as evidenced by how many terrorist attacks happened on Clinton’s watch as opposed to G.W’s)…and that bothers me…and not just because there are people out there who think that they can assess effective anti-terror public policy by counting on their fingers.
I guess mostly because High School Freaks and Geeks already have enough trouble without the being labeled “Potential Terrorists”.
I mean, it was bad enough when I went to high school and we were just geeks. It was worse later when people thought that unpopular kids were ticking time bombs, and “cracked down” on them as potential murderers rather than addressing the social stresses that tend to cause people to snap and break.
And before you snort derisively and say that “teasing” is not a social stress, and these freaks should just get a thicker skin, let me list a few of the things I experienced in High School in the ‘80’s and see if you think you would like to face this on a daily basis at work for four years running.
- Boys grabbed my breasts on a regular basis.
- I was twice grabbed in the crotch by boys.
- I was called a “Bitch”, “Slut” “Whore” “Dyke” “Psycho”, and “Loser”, to my face on a daily basis. (I might add that “Slut” and “Whore” were used before I’d even had my first kiss or went out on a date. Also…not a dyke. Bitch, psycho and loser are up for grabs. Think what you will.)
- There were a couple boys who would make loud, public statements of graphic sexual acts they wished to perform with me, to the obvious amusement of large groups of people. This happened regularly.
- A teacher in the school hauled me up in front of a classroom full of my peers and gave a several-minute long lecture detailing all of the traits that made me a “loser”.
- When I had swimming class, my bra was stolen (presumably by other girls) with such regularity that I eventually had to ask the swimming teacher to lock it in her desk.
- I regularly got notes in my locker calling me a “Bitch”, a “Psycho”, “White Trash” and a “Loser”. I also got notes detailing sexual fantasies and threats of physical violence from anonymous sources.
- I was regularly tripped, shoved, and “shouldered” in the hallways.
- On several occasions, I was tripped or shoved on the staircases, on some occasions, I fell down the stairs.
- On several occasions, I was spit on by other girls.
- One boy, who was seated behind me in several classes due to alphabetical seating, continuously and on a daily basis, kicked me in the kidneys, poked me in the back with a pencil, or smacked me on the back of the head. Complaints to the teachers resulted in sporadic and half-hearted discipline.
This was all in a “nice” Midwestern small town high school. I’m only talking about the things that happened on school grounds. For some reason, this is called “teasing” or “bullying” when it happens to children. If you had to face this daily in a work environment, you would call it abuse, sexual harassment, and assault.
I also know someone, a smallish boy, who was locked in the trunk of his car as a “joke”, a boy from another school who was pissed on as a “joke”. I know a girl from another school who was threatened with a knife, and cut on the bus.
My two Vietnamese foster brothers and the Vietnamese boy I was seeing at the time were assaulted, along with several other Vietnamese kids by a large crowd of white students. A boy I considered a friend was struck in the back of the head with a tire iron, and nearly died. The Vietnamese kids were routinely referred to as “gooks”, “chinks”, “monkeys” and “slants”. The Vietnamese girls were routinely referred to as “fortune cookies”. Indian kids were routinely referred to as “knobs” (short for Anishenaubae…the predominantly represented Indian Nation in the area). A teacher called one of my sister’s friends a “nigger”…
…I could go on, but honestly, I don’t have the heart. If you don’t want to take my word for it, you can research the subject further here, or any number of places. If you go to Google and type in “Voices from the Hellmouth”, you will get a page full of information on this topic. You can read about it all day, if you like.
And anyway, all of this isn’t the point. The point is that these kids are abused, and then punished for the results of that abuse…on the assumption that they are going to shoot up their schools.
More than a decade pre-Columbine, a group of kids I knew even drew up battle plans for an assault of the school, but of course they didn’t do it. They never intended to. It was an intellectual exercise. It was something to blow off steam. They were military strategy buffs and WWII buffs. They drew pictures and wrote stories of the horrible, tortured mangled deaths of the kids who were doing it to them, and the teachers and staff who ignored it. They did not carry out any of these actions. I would submit to you that tens if not hundreds of thousands of students across the country have indulged in the admittedly unhealthy practice of fantasizing about destroying their school and slaughtering their classmates. All Theology aside; thinking about it is not doing it.
Honestly, what would you do? When the best advice from parents and teachers and staff is “avoid” them or “ignore them” or “talk your way out of it”? When, on the rare occasion that some action is taken, it only makes it worse? How do you avoid them when they hunt you down? How do you ignore them when they are in your face? How do you talk your way out of it when they are already shoving you down the stairs?
Wouldn’t your thoughts turn a little…dark? Don’t you think that your choice in music might turn violent? Your style of dress might turn “violent”…your behavior might turn…a little violent?
And I gotta say that severely smacking down a couple of people now and then was the only thing that worked. They still hated me, sniped from a distance, left their anonymous notes…but they kept their hands off me, for a while.
It sucked, but it made me tough, and I think when I got done being angry, suicidal and self-destructive, it gave me a much deeper sense of compassion and love for the good in humanity…as well as a deeper appreciation of good people. I don’t take it for granted. I don’t assume that good or decent is the baseline, and I treasure it.
But I had to get through the nihilism and the anger and the hate and the damage before I could get there.
Following the Columbine murders, story after story emerged of kids being arrested, expelled, and investigated on what can only be described as “thought crimes”. Many stories of kid’s private notebooks being used against them, and being charged with “terroristic threat”, being expelled for the clothing they wore, the music they listened to, or even just the friends they hung out with. Punished because of what someone thought they “might do” based on subjective interpretations of their ways of expressing their feelings about the crap going on in their lives. And now there are people who are equating what they “might” do with terrorism? Would investigation, apprehension and detention methods allowed under the Patriot Act then apply? It sounds silly, but I have to ask. What about street gangs? Are they terrorists? How about any kind of organized crime effort? What about activist groups who organize dissent? Ann Coulter calls them terrorists, so has Dick Cheney. Mission creep is a dangerous thing when part of the “mission” involves suspending people’s constitutionally protected rights.
OK, maybe the above sounds like whining. It’s not meant to be. Everything I described is people doing what people do. They isolate the green monkeys, they attack and prey upon the weak, they ignore things that they could do something about, but are too lazy or whatever to take care of it, they blame the victim, and over-react when things come to a boil…It sucks, and it’s not fair, but it is life.
But from what I can tell looking at it from the outside, what the murderers at Columbine did appears to also be people doing what people do. People break under torture. The weak either kill themselves, or they get strong. They get the only strength their tormentors understand. They answer violence with violence. They abandon morals when they see that there is no effective moral answer for their situation.
Yes, the kids who committed the murders at Columbine were murderers. Yes, it was a tragedy, and they bear the blame and ultimate responsibility. They were severely damaged, broken, and twisted, and they made a choice to end the cause of their suffering rather than endure it one more day. It’s not a choice I support, it’s not the choice I made. I condemn it, but I also understand it, because of all those times I was there, toe to the edge of the line. If they were alive right now, I would be behind them going to prison and never getting out, no matter what. They surrendered their humanity by choice, when they scorned their lives and the lives of others.
But I draw the line at calling them terrorists. Absolutely not. As wrong and broken and as twisted as they were…they were not terrorists. And neither are the kids all across the country who bear certain similarities to them. They are our children, and we can prevent them from being lost if we do the work. The work is allowing for and providing for moral alternatives, paying attention to situations as they develop, putting systems in place for dealing with bullying.
Many schools have gone further, by cultivating a sense of community, and by celebrating diversity…by offering healthy alternatives and outlets like Anime’, computer gaming and role-playing gaming clubs and other alternative social validations that give these kids a “place” that suits them, rather than trying to make them fit some cookie-cutter mold.
And for Pete’s sake can we try to stay on target and stop throwing the word “terror” around like white-wash in an Amish community? Dissent is not terror, nor is weirdness, nor brokenness, nor bad moods nor being Michael Moore. Finally, the Columbine tragedy was a mass murder, not a terrorist attack. Calling it terrorism is a disservice to the precision of thought and action required by the seriousness of both issues.
Terror is Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, The Unibomber, Osama Bin Ladin…
I admit, it gets fuzzy, but we have to draw the line somewhere.