| From Slashdot's Jon Katz, posted just days after the high school shootings
in Littleton, Colorado. This piece has been excerpted and edited by me;
for the complete article, click on the link below:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went on a panicked hunt for the oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even worse situation than before. Stories all over the country embarked on witchunts that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. The big story out of Littleton isn't about violence on the Internet, or whether or not video games are turning our kids into killers. It's about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger. The big story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages or the TV talk shows. [The real big story] was the spotlight the Littleton, Colorado killings has put on the fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high school is a Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values and rage. People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky ones are excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated, sometimes assaulted literally as well as socially. Odd values - unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are exalted, while the best values - free thinking, non-conformity, curiousity - are ridiculed. On the Web, kids flocked to talk to each other. On Star Wars and X-Files mailing lists and websites and on AOL chat rooms and ICQ message boards, teenagers traded countless countless stories of being harassed, beaten, ostracized and ridiculed by teachers, students and administrators for dressing and thinking differently from the mainstream. Many said they had some understanding of why the killers in Littleton went over the edge. "We want to be different," wrote one of the Colorado killers in a diary found by the police. "We want to be strange and we don't want jocks or other people putting us down." The sentiment, if not the response to it, was echoed by kids all over the country. The Littleton killings have made their lives much worse. "It was horrible, definitely," e-mailed Bandy from New York City. "After Colorado, things got horrible. People were actually talking to me like I could come in and kill them. It wasn't like they were really afraid of me - they just seemed to think it was okay to hate me even more. People asked me if I had guns at home. This is a whole new level of exclusion, another excuse for the preppies of the universe to put down and isolate people like me." Unhappy, alienated, isolated kids are legion in schools, although voiceless
in media, education and politics. But theirs are the most important voices
of all in understanding what happened and perhaps even how to keep it from
happening again.
"I stood up in a social studies class -the teacher wanted a discussion -- and said I could never kill anyone or condone anyone who did kill anyone. But that I could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because day after day, slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can learn how to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over sometimes, especially when you come to see that you're hated only because you're smart and different, or sometimes even because you are online a lot, which is still so uncool to many kids. After the class, I was called to the principal's office and told that
I had to agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or be expelled from
school, as I had expressed 'sympathy' with the killers in Colorado, and
the school had to be able to explain itself if I 'acted out'. In other
words, for speaking freely, and to cover their ass, I was not only branded
a weird geek, but a potential killer. That will sure help deal with violence
in America."
"The hate just eats you up, like the molten metal moving up Keanu Reeve's
arm in the 'The Matrix.' That's what I thought of when I saw it. You lose
track of what is real and what isn't. The worst people are the happiest
and do the best, the best and smartest people are the most miserable and
picked upon. The cruelty is unimaginable. If Dan Rather wants to know why
those guys killed those people in Littleton, Colorado, tell him for me
that the kids who run the school probably drove them crazy, bit by bit.That
doesn't mean all those kids deserved to die. But a lot of kids in America
know why it happened, even if the people running schools don't."
"To be honest, I sympathized much more with the shooters than the shootees.
I am them. They are me. This is not to say I will end the lives of my classmates
in a hail of bullets, but that their former situation bears a striking
resemblance to my own. For the most part, the media are clueless. They're
never experienced social rejection, or chosen non-conformity. Also, I would
like to postulate that the kind of measures taken by school administration
have a direct effect on school violence. School is generally an oppressive
place; the parallels to fascist society are tantalizing. Following a school
shooting, a week or two-week crackdown ensues, where students' constitutional
rights are violated with impunity, at a greater rate than previous."
"High school favors people with a certain look and attitude - the adolescent equivalent of Aryans. They are the chosen ones, and they want to get rid of anyone who doesn't look and think the way they do. One of the things which makes this so infuriating is that the system favors shallow people. Anyone who took the time to think about things would realize that things like the prom, school spirit and who won the football game are utterly insignificant in the larger scheme of things. So anyone with depth of thought is almost automatically excluded from the main high school social structure. It's like some horribly twisted form of Social Darwinism. I would never, ever do anything at all like what was done in Colorado.
I can't understand how anyone could. But I do understand the hatred of
high school life which, I guess, prompted it."
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