Columbine

I am sitting at my kitchen table, my head in my hands. My husband is surreptitiously watching me from the living room, unsure what, if anything, he should be doing to help me. I am not crying, nor have I asked for anything. In fact, I probably haven't said anything out loud in several hours.  

Finally I look up.  
"How much," I ask him quietly, "do you know about Columbine?"  

I don't have to say anything else. Everyone in America knows what "Columbine" refers to, and my husband is no exception.

I asked him what he knew about it, about the shooters and their motives, and without hesitation he parroted the media story that we’ve been hearing since it first happened, back when we were in 5th or 6th grade and school shootings were nearly unheard-of.  

That story can be summarized as two boys, possibly involved in the Trench Coat Mafia, are outcasts, victims of years of bullying and abuse. At the end of their senior year in high school, they decided to fight back against the jocks and others who had hurt them, seeking revenge specifically against those who had wronged them. They terrorized a school and ended up committing suicide when they were done.

The problem is this: all of this information is wrong.

Columbine, written by an investigative journalist named David Cullen who was on the scene when the news first broke and followed the story for years, walks the reader through both the day of the shooting and the year-long choices and psychological issues that lead to it. He looks at every media story, every myth that's become fact, every horrifying element of the tragedy in an attempt to show what actually happened, how those boys got there, and ultimately, help prevent it from happening again.

My husband's story, the media story, is a easy if horrific one to accept: these kids were pushed to the edge and walked into that school with vengeance in mind.  I don't like calling it easy to understand, but it is true; thinking that they had targets makes people feel like the gunmen had a purpose, that they were acting out of some twisted revenge fantasy, that they could possibly have been, in some sick way, justified in their actions.
Back in 1999, the media made the choice to put forth an understandable lie, one that the average person could understand even as they were repulsed, instead of an incomprehensible truth. But when Cullen opens Pandora's Box into their motives, when he peels back the layers of their own words, psych evaluations, criminal records, and more, the truth is laid bare.

These two boys didn't have targets. They weren't intending to shoot up their school. The reality of Columbine, what the media never really revealed, was that Columbine was supposed to be much, much worse. It is true that Eric Harris was the mastermind behind their plan, that Dylan Klebold was more accomplice than partner, and that both boys lived with violence and death on their minds. But what is also true is that the boys were trying to kill every single person in their school -- trying to out-do the Oklahoma City bombings in deaths, actually, and had obtained guns merely as a back-up plan -- and it was a combination of faulty wiring and blind chance that kept so many more from meeting their ends that day.

This fact makes their choices and thus the result nearly impossible to understand.

And it is for that reason that Columbine, the novel and the event, is one of the scariest things I have or will ever encounter.

This photo of Columbine High School is the only image you will find in this post. Plenty of images of that day live online; my blog won't be one of them. 

I’ve heard it said that schools are haunted by Columbine.  You bet your life they are -- the ghosts of Columbine march up and down hallways across the country, inspiring intruder drills and hotline calls and referrals to counselors and principals.  

But those ghosts are most scary because they hint at the possibility of the next Columbine, the next Sandy Hook, the next Virginia Tech.  And they scare schools because, deep down, we aren't sure how to prevent it from happening again.  

Until about two weeks into my teacher career, I was unfamiliar with Intruder Drills, an unnerving phenomenon designed to prepared students and staff with what to do if someone unwelcome or dangerous entered our building.  I’d never had one at my private, all-girls high school, and with good reasons: while most school shooters statistically are white, as were most of my classmates, most school shooters are also male.  Since we lacked that element, my principals must have assumed (correctly, thus far) we were safe.  

My first intruder drill passed without incident.  But a few weeks later, that same cold, emotionless voice came over the intercom and announced that my school had an intruder.  For about twenty dark minutes, we legitimately thought something awful had happened.  We were wrong -- the alert had been set off accidentally.  I’m sure intruder alerts get accidentally set off all the time, and we were certainly lucky, luckier than too many other schools where shootings have occurred.  

Intruder Drills are a necessary evil of our current society.  They work well against the Adam Lanzas of the world, those who do indeed enter uninvited and kill.  

But my concern after reading Columbine is this:  Intruder drills don’t work as well against the Eric Harrises and Dylan Klebolds of the world -- those who can walk in as students and (perhaps) choose to walk out as murderers.  

Of course the Adam Lanzas of the world are scary -- they are unpredictable and totally foreign.  But to me, as a teacher who interacts with students on a constant basis, the Erics and the Dylans are far more terrifying.  I witness kids full of hate, kids full of anger, kids who never make any kind of threat or write anything off-putting -- those things that I could report to the school and make those above me aware of just how nerve-wracking and scary some students can be.  Few of my students are like that, and for that I am extremely grateful.  But I have seen them, and wondered.  

The unavoidable fact that I cannot help picturing this school as my own does not ease my trepidation.  When Cullen discusses how the boys put the bombs up against the columns in the cafeteria, I imagine it as the cafeteria of the high school where I teach.  When they shoot up the library and science classrooms, I imagine my own library and science classrooms.  When Patrick Ireland breaks through and climbs out a window to attempt a fall to safety, I picture firetrucks and paramedics clustered outside my building, while above a student crawls out of the front and broken windows of my school.  In some ways, that is more traumatizing for me than simply reading about the events, because that is truly what is so terrifying about Columbine: it could be my school.  

There is potential for it at every school, no matter how many times my principal says he believes we have a safe school (which I agree with).  That doesn't change the reality: Columbine could be my school, could be any school in America.  

Occasionally, as part of a unit about social issues and their solutions, I show Bowling for Columbine, the Michael Moore documentary that attempts to deal with the issues and aftermath of Columbine.  He’s largely about ruffling feathers, I get that, and usually I use it to talk about logical fallacies in arguments (it’s an excellent resource for that!) and how to make connections beyond the simple scope of a topic.  Every time I show it, we talk about school shootings: about how unprecedented Columbine was, how unexpected and terrifying, and about how it changed some fundamental parts of education and its settings.  No matter how much I talk with them about it, no matter how many times I get on the soapbox, the novelty and outrage it sparked never seem to fully click.

At first I wondered why this was.  And then the truth of it dawned on me: School shootings are normal for my students; they are used to hearing about them.  As horrifying as they are, as emotionally as students respond when it happens, school shootings are no longer out of the ordinary.  

I have trouble accepting this.  I recognize its truth; these shootings, and the expectation of further and quite possibly unpreventable violence, are perhaps the worst part of American society, worst because people are used to them, and when people get used to something, they can let it pass without comment, without it inciting change.  When something becomes normal, it becomes okay.  It loses its moral obligation for us to fix it, to solve it, and that should never happen with school shootings.  The issue desperately needs to be solved, but my concern is that it never will be.  

It may be a microcosm of American society and politics in itself.  After all, a conversation started after Sandy Hook about gun control and mental illness treatments in America.  But nothing came of it.  Politicians started shouting about the Second Amendment and others started shouting about the American Disability Act and discrimination and others started shouting about conspiracy theories and hoaxes and pretty soon actually solving the issue sank back into the turmoil of American social  problems.  

I understand some of this; it’s not an easy issue to discuss, let alone solve, and too much of what motivates these shooters is deep and complex and beyond the abilities of any one group (be it schools, lawmakers, mental help professionals, or others) to handle.  But doesn’t that just mean we need more cooperation, less shouting and finger-pointing?

This questioning process, the what if's and what can we do's, are a natural repercussion of violence like this. But it's time for that to change and for us to truly say, "never again," and make it the truth.

Please read this book.

And don't just trust my opinion: New York Times Book Reviews: Columbine

Final Note: This post took me a very, very long time to write. A great deal of this reservation stems from my struggle with the subject matter; this book scared me, a lot, and being a teacher only makes it harder to process.