Dreaming about Columbine
I was sixteen and a junior in high school when Columbine happened. For me, hearing about it was one of those flashbulb memories, where you remember all the little details of exactly what was going on when I saw the news; people talk about the Kennedy assassination the same way. I was in Quiz Bowl practice. We were getting ready for an online tournament called Knowledge Master. I don't know why we turned on the news, or who told us to, because we were in an otherwise-isolated English classroom after school, but I remember Paul, our team captain turning on the TV right to the channel showing coverage of a school shooting.
It wasn't the first school shooting that had happened in the country - those had started when I was earlier in high school. I remember that they hadn't yet started when I was in middle school, because I was always grateful that I was born a few years too early to get into trouble for my 8th-grade habit of doodling my school building being gorily blown up by a hail of bombs in the margins of my notebook.
But, this one seemed to be more important, though I'm not sure why it seemed that way early on. Maybe it was the scope of the thing. Maybe I'm projecting later memories back onto the moment - or maybe the media treats every shooting like it's going to be a big deal, and one of them finally was. I don't remember feeling shaken, but I think Paul was. I think he knew people in Littleton. Not for the last time, I wondered how I would react in a school shooting. For years, I would have daydreams of being the one to bravely lead the rush against a would-be shooter. I wondered if I would ever get over being in a school shooting, and if I would be scarred by seeing my and my friends' shell-shock broadcast on national TV in, as William Gibson once put it, some vast and deeply personal insult against any ordinary notion of interiority. No doubt, if it actually happened, I would have been cowering under a table, like everyone else.
In the days that followed, there were a series of bomb threats and copycat massacre threats called into schools all over my county, and one bomb threat accidentally called into a grocery store with the same name as a high school. All were fake, but all were pleasant distractions - every time a threat was called in, they had to evacuate the building as a precaution and sweep the place. It was a beautiful spring that year, so we all loved the chance to just relax in the sunny fields instead of being in school. No wonder there were so many bomb threats.
There might be some people reading this who were a bit too young to remember the cultural reaction in the months after Columbine, breathless stories about kids in black trench coats and Marilyn Manson turning sweet teenagers into monsters. The evangelical cult status of Cassie Bernal, "the girl who said yes", took time to really spread, and the drama that ensued over the story's debunking came even later than that. In the immediate fallout, I remember that some wanted to blame guns, others wanted to blame culture, and just about everyone agreed that more vigilance was needed, whatever that meant. It's from this era that we got bizarre zero-tolerance policies about toenail clippers in school and the like.
But what I remember most clearly from the fallout was the part that seemed most present in my own life: in all of the talk about Columbine, I remember a very clear subtext that the targeted victims had been good, popular kids, athletes and cheerleader types, and the killers had been marginal and bullied. It turned out the story was more complicated than that - I direct you to the obsessively-reported Columbine by Dave Cullen - but that was the narrative at the time. The narrative struck home for me because it wove so perfectly into my own persecution narrative. It was easy to read such a killing as the act of teenagers who had been exposed to hell day in and day out while authority figures did nothing to help and defended their persecutors as 'good kids', finally fighting back. Of course the world would react with horror - horror at the thought of their victims finally standing up for themselves. After all, who were all these authority figures but jocks and cheerleaders, all grown up? Naturally, they would try to put the misfits everywhere back in their place by using Columbine to stigmatize misfits even further.
Looking back on this line of thought, it was pretty over the top, but not completely crazy. Because in all this talk about Marilyn Manson and needing more 'vigilance', authorities at my school and at other schools really did begin to fear that they, too, had shooters in their midst. They created a watch-list that authorized all manner of surveillance and harassment - you know, to make sure they catch signs of trouble. And what got you put on that watch list? Wearing too much black, being associated with certain subcultures, the anonymous tip of another student. The latter thing, in particular, created an atmosphere of fear. I know of at least a few people who wound up on a watch-list because someone maliciously told the authorities some tall tale about them.
I stayed off the list, but not all of my friends and acquaintances had my talent for appearing harmless. It wasn't just a stigma the school created. It was a new category of student, one who is automatically suspect, who needs to be monitored, who is, without having actually done anything other than not fit in very well, already a quasi-criminal who does not get the benefit of the doubt. Needless to say, this policy was not used only to stop school violence. Like any watch list, it turned out to have more mundane disciplinary uses.
I can't point to anyone's life who was ruined by this policy - aside from a couple of kids getting suspended for having nail files in their backpack, which probably made college applications a bit harder. Nor can I think of official action pushing an otherwise good-but-marginal kid into actual delinquency. So it's not like my high school turned into an Orwellian police state in the wake of Columbine. But it was hard not to read the immediate fallout as reinforcing our own little, petty, teenage status structures, which could be cruel enough without any help from terrified authorities.
P.S. I'm in San Francisco for the next month or so. Normally, I go into radio silence this time of year, but this time, I'm going to try to be more active. Let's see how I do.
It wasn't the first school shooting that had happened in the country - those had started when I was earlier in high school. I remember that they hadn't yet started when I was in middle school, because I was always grateful that I was born a few years too early to get into trouble for my 8th-grade habit of doodling my school building being gorily blown up by a hail of bombs in the margins of my notebook.
But, this one seemed to be more important, though I'm not sure why it seemed that way early on. Maybe it was the scope of the thing. Maybe I'm projecting later memories back onto the moment - or maybe the media treats every shooting like it's going to be a big deal, and one of them finally was. I don't remember feeling shaken, but I think Paul was. I think he knew people in Littleton. Not for the last time, I wondered how I would react in a school shooting. For years, I would have daydreams of being the one to bravely lead the rush against a would-be shooter. I wondered if I would ever get over being in a school shooting, and if I would be scarred by seeing my and my friends' shell-shock broadcast on national TV in, as William Gibson once put it, some vast and deeply personal insult against any ordinary notion of interiority. No doubt, if it actually happened, I would have been cowering under a table, like everyone else.
In the days that followed, there were a series of bomb threats and copycat massacre threats called into schools all over my county, and one bomb threat accidentally called into a grocery store with the same name as a high school. All were fake, but all were pleasant distractions - every time a threat was called in, they had to evacuate the building as a precaution and sweep the place. It was a beautiful spring that year, so we all loved the chance to just relax in the sunny fields instead of being in school. No wonder there were so many bomb threats.
There might be some people reading this who were a bit too young to remember the cultural reaction in the months after Columbine, breathless stories about kids in black trench coats and Marilyn Manson turning sweet teenagers into monsters. The evangelical cult status of Cassie Bernal, "the girl who said yes", took time to really spread, and the drama that ensued over the story's debunking came even later than that. In the immediate fallout, I remember that some wanted to blame guns, others wanted to blame culture, and just about everyone agreed that more vigilance was needed, whatever that meant. It's from this era that we got bizarre zero-tolerance policies about toenail clippers in school and the like.
But what I remember most clearly from the fallout was the part that seemed most present in my own life: in all of the talk about Columbine, I remember a very clear subtext that the targeted victims had been good, popular kids, athletes and cheerleader types, and the killers had been marginal and bullied. It turned out the story was more complicated than that - I direct you to the obsessively-reported Columbine by Dave Cullen - but that was the narrative at the time. The narrative struck home for me because it wove so perfectly into my own persecution narrative. It was easy to read such a killing as the act of teenagers who had been exposed to hell day in and day out while authority figures did nothing to help and defended their persecutors as 'good kids', finally fighting back. Of course the world would react with horror - horror at the thought of their victims finally standing up for themselves. After all, who were all these authority figures but jocks and cheerleaders, all grown up? Naturally, they would try to put the misfits everywhere back in their place by using Columbine to stigmatize misfits even further.
Looking back on this line of thought, it was pretty over the top, but not completely crazy. Because in all this talk about Marilyn Manson and needing more 'vigilance', authorities at my school and at other schools really did begin to fear that they, too, had shooters in their midst. They created a watch-list that authorized all manner of surveillance and harassment - you know, to make sure they catch signs of trouble. And what got you put on that watch list? Wearing too much black, being associated with certain subcultures, the anonymous tip of another student. The latter thing, in particular, created an atmosphere of fear. I know of at least a few people who wound up on a watch-list because someone maliciously told the authorities some tall tale about them.
I stayed off the list, but not all of my friends and acquaintances had my talent for appearing harmless. It wasn't just a stigma the school created. It was a new category of student, one who is automatically suspect, who needs to be monitored, who is, without having actually done anything other than not fit in very well, already a quasi-criminal who does not get the benefit of the doubt. Needless to say, this policy was not used only to stop school violence. Like any watch list, it turned out to have more mundane disciplinary uses.
I can't point to anyone's life who was ruined by this policy - aside from a couple of kids getting suspended for having nail files in their backpack, which probably made college applications a bit harder. Nor can I think of official action pushing an otherwise good-but-marginal kid into actual delinquency. So it's not like my high school turned into an Orwellian police state in the wake of Columbine. But it was hard not to read the immediate fallout as reinforcing our own little, petty, teenage status structures, which could be cruel enough without any help from terrified authorities.
P.S. I'm in San Francisco for the next month or so. Normally, I go into radio silence this time of year, but this time, I'm going to try to be more active. Let's see how I do.