Columbine High, Class of '99
By now the media exposure of Columbine High School
has supersaturated our senses via TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Everyone
wonders why this tragedy happened. Everyone wonders why children could be
so infatuated in not only killing others, but also in relishing in the verbal
taunts before and the physical bodily damage after.
Tunnel vision is a dangerous thing; living in a
bubble is a dangerous thing. The “trench coat
mafia” experienced both as a way of life. But living in a bubble is not life
as we know it, but life as those in the bubble interpret it. In “To Kill
A Mockingbird,” when Scout called upon her neighbors in the lynch mob by
name, she chipped away at mob thinking, an unwieldy monster of a vehicle
that can so easily cross the median into oncoming traffic. She weakened the
bubble that the mob lived in, whose filmy lens distorted their view of reality.
She bestowed upon each of them the perspective of interrelating with the
world as we’re supposed to know it, not as is bounced back and forth in the
bubble. This bubble is just that fragile, not taking much to pop it and in
so doing render a clear vision of the world around its occupants.
A laser works by bouncing light back and forth within a mirrored chamber
with only a small hole to let the stimulated beam escape. Living in a bubble
likewise takes human thought and feelings, bounces them around, distorts
them, amplifies them, until what escapes is the narrowest point of view,
usually amplified as powerful hate. This beam of maladjustment cuts through
anything in it’s path, be it a Luby’s, a college campus, or even a high school
library. With such a narrow beam of exposure to the world, the vision can’t
help but be tunnel-vision.
With so much force coming out through such a narrow
opening, nothing like compassion or tolerance can really get in. If everyone
wonders why, this is why.
We all wonder how human beings can perpetrate such
atrocities that have such horror when actually “in the flesh,” yet we still
all tune in to the “special” Dateline, the “special” Today, and the special
“60 Minutes” to hear for ourselves the details of how the bullets ripped
through the bodies. There’s the connection! We seek the pathos of hearing
how the gunman asked his victim if she believed in God. We’re inquiring minds
and we want to know. Eventually the special made-for-TV movie will compete
on one network with the special made-for-TV movie on the other network. If
you think we couldn’t get any more arousal on what the gunmen said in their
taunts, just wait until we actually see it for ourselves according to the
screenwriters. And we can’t wait. Advertising time will be expensive for
these “docudramas” that will sweeten the pie for the networks during Sweeps
Week.
Meanwhile, we keep handing out the twenties to send
our under-17's off to the movies to see the R-rated and NC-17 films that
use murder as purely entertainment. And meanwhile we scold our children that
hitting each other is not the way to settle things while the WWF wrestler
hits the other with a chair on the screen that is on in the very same room.
Purely as entertainment. And meanwhile we find it so hard to make the kids
turn off Doom and Duke Nukem, the video games that are stalking ambulations
through–that’s right, tunnel-vision--labyrinths of victims blown to bits
by the powerful weapon that is the only object in the foreground to represent
the player on his rounds of elimination.
Purely for entertainment.
Good children see R-rate movies. Good children get
into the WWF’s circus of come-uppances, bravado, and revenge. And good children
blast scores of human and inhuman targets on video games. The First Amendment
means that these vehicles of amphibian thinking, thinking that we have spent
millennia building brain convolutions around to suppress, will still be there
for the bad children, too (bad parents?). What is the answer?
The right answer is that there is no answer.
Looking at it from a purely statistical point of
view, only two out of 300 million Americans went on a mass murder rampage
that day. Looking at it from a geopolitical view, only 13 people were slaughtered,
what would be a mere pre-breakfast exercise for the pre-NATO ethnic cleansing
teams in Kosovo. But Columbine High School still hurts so, so bad. What is
it about the Caucasian brain that lets the amphibian thinking out every now
and then. Why is it that we don’t hear of African-Americans killing and eating
a slew of people like Jeffrey Dahmler, or executing total strangers just
for some strange catharsis like Charles Manson’s groupies did, or thinking
that a mass-suicide is a legitimate option in the religions like that of
Jim Jones, or rampaging through a high school randomly killing for fun as
many people as they possibly can.
(And now we hear there is evidence that Homo sapiens
interbred with the Neanderthal.)
I’m confused as to how I’m decimated by what happened
in Littleton, but only consider the mass graves in Bosnia with a passing
geopolitical interest. I’m confused at how there’s so much profit to be made
in presenting murder purely as entertainment. I’m confused that so many children
can be exposed to adult tragedies with all of the realism that multimedia
has to offer, and only some of them hope to create their own stalking labyrinths
of pointless violence. My point? None that isn’t intuitively obvious:
Good and evil, and the difference between them,
really should be intuitively obvious, even in children raised badly.
Those policing convolutions in our brains--that
we’ve worked so hard to develop and which enforce the concepts of civilization--suppress
the cruelty of survival-at-anyone’s-expense and the senseless violence-of-anger-at-any-cost.
Most of the time, anyway.
What to do...what to do? It hurts so bad we can’t
do anything. Grief is an unfair emotion, because there’s no payoff and no
restitution. Even appropriate grieving leaves a scar that fails to seal over
adequately that hole in the heart that’s left there. Does lashing out help?
It helps the amphibian parts of our brain but does nothing to satisfy the
reasoning convolutions that make us human.
It may be a linguistic coincidence that there is
only one letter’s difference between glory and gory. It may be that there
are people with empty shells whose souls already suffer in Hell before their
lives end here. It may be that the epic story of the good angels, led by
Michael, and bad angels, led by Lucifer, is really the battle we fight here
on Earth, in life as we know it, and that the mythical battle is a parable
to advise us that the battleground for us here and the antediluvial one with
the angels are one and the same. And it may be that at Columbine High School
we lost 13 good angels and two bad ones on that day.
It may be that all 15 are now where they would want
to be.
Copyright 1999, Gerard M. DiLeo, M.D.
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