10 years after columbine and we have learned…nothing.
20 April 200910 years ago, when the columbine massacre blazed a trail across the evening news, and newspapers around the world, I went home from work and I wrote an essay. In 2004, I dug up that essay, and put it on my blog, after reading the columbine massacre report was released. You can find that essay here. The columbine massacre, and similar tragedies hit home for me in many ways. In grade school, I was often picked on and mistreated because I was different, and because I elected to embrace being singular, individual, and looking back on it: I dared to have dreams. While I did not get a gun to solve my problems…I did something worse when I got to high school: I rejected the best parts of myself to mold myself into something that would fit in, to gain acceptance. I became what I truly was not, just to make the people around me happy. Rather than get a gun and kill others, I simply started killing myself slowly.
It was the worst period of my entire life.
(The sad part is, across this country, every day, children and teenagers are faced with the same choice I had. Many choose to abandon individualism to fit in. It partially explains the culture of mediocrity we currently have. But every once in awhile, one turns to violence. You just cannot escape the law of averages on that.)
So, here we are. It’s been 10 years. What have we learned? I would argue we have not learned much, if anything. I would even argue we have become far more intolerant. Today, media will cover what the survivors have been doing, how things have changed for them, and for us. More than likely, however, the spotlight will not be focused on the causes of the tragedy.
I’ll say it again. We have learned nothing. Indeed, after Columbine, we had some followups in Paducah, Kentucky, and Jonesboro, Mississippi. Michael Corneal fired into a prayer group, and while the media was quick to point out the senselessness of the act, I saw only one report at that time that indicated the people in the prayer group had put their significant mental abuse resources into taunting Mr. Corneal until he went over the edge. In Jonesboro, you had a similar situation: a couple of boys who were mistreated by the student body.
It does not end with school shootings. Our inability to learn from tragedy extends to the Virginia Tech shootings. It extends to 9/11. We have learned nothing, because as a society we, Americans, steadfastly refuse to shine the light on ourselves. Through our arrogant assumption that as a society we are the pinnacle…we fail to ask ourselves if maybe we have something to do with these things that happen to us. We fail to look at the true causative circumstances.
What do we do instead? We try to ban video games. We try to ban guns. In short, as my essay predicted in not so subtle prose: we elected to ban the trenchcoats. As if they were the reason. We try to ban things we associate with the moving bullet, without even giving a thought to the powder we loaded behind it. We went to ban clothes, guns, and little shampoo bottles in airports rather than ask ourselves the most critical question: did we, through our intolerance, through our own inability to treat people equitably, add a reason or two of our own for these tragic events? Did we, as a society, refuse to shine the light of brutal truth on ourselves? Or did we just look for an easy outlet to use as an altar upon which to lay our own shame?
Kliebold, Harris, Corneal, Cho…surely, and without a doubt allowed evil to enter their hearts. But, they had help opening the door. But nobody, nobody wants to think about what they could have done to prevent it. Nobody want’s to look at the superficial girls or football players who taunted and drove the Columbine killers over the edge. Why do that when we can lay blame on Doom II? Nobody wants to look at the hypocracy of a prayer group, and the beautiful people…why do that when we can simply blame an XBox?
Who wants to blame almost 50 years of hostile and discriminatory foreign policy towards the middle east, when we can just single out people who wear funny clothes?
We have learned absolutely nothing after the last 10 years. After the last 50 years. After the last 100 years. You will have to forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for the survivors of Columbine. You will have to forgive me if I do not shed a tear for any of us left behind after all of these atrocities. I refuse to allow myself to be swallowed up in self righteous media driven pity. Because we have learned nothing from these things, we have not earned the right to move ahead. We have earned the right to ask only one question: when will it happen again?
Because it will. We refuse to learn from history, therefore it will repeat itself.
Current Mood:
Disappointed
on April 20th, 2009 at 10:43 am
You hit the nail on the head again.
I must say that you are correct on all accounts. Instead of people looking into themselves and changing themselves for the better and getting rid of thier evil demons they look for other things to hide behind and not stand up to take action for themselves and what they did wrong.
Being the receiver of the nasty taunts of the “pretty people” in school I certainly feel your pain and thier pain. However no matter what I did I could never become “a pretty person”. I was always an outcast, an ugly duckling.
Thankfully I had friends who were too and we stuck together and stood by each other.