4.22.99

    I remember being accused as a teenager of feeling invincible, of not knowing my own mortality. In a way, this is true through I didn't feel it at the time. I had a surface idea of what death was all about but I couldn't see how it related to me. It was more a matter of perspective.

    Do you remember when you were very little and Christmas was so very far away? Or, as you trudged in and out of the daily school grind that summer seemed like it would never arrive? Eventually, it always did and as I get older the summers and Christmas's come faster and faster. I can see farther into the future than I ever could before and things that rocked my world as a teen don't have nearly the emotional impact. I remember how stressful it was to grow up. How heartbreaking a silly little romance could be and how crushing it was to get snubbed. Later in life, these things tend to roll off just a little bit easier because there's a greater sense that "this too shall pass."

    I watched all of the coverage on Tuesday of the Colorado massacre. I couldn't tear myself away. I'm still having difficulty not watching and listening and trying to remember how I was as a teen and how this doesn't surprise me that much. It's a horror, to be sure, and I have had to swallow more than a few hard lumps in my throat as I listened to the stories and felt a small amount of their grief and pain, but it's not that foreign.

    There were never any deaths in any of my high schools (I attended three but if you count 8th grade it's four) but there was plenty of strife. Plenty of frustration and plenty of anger. I tended to gravitate towards the "outcasts" and the "misfits." Most of these people were great people, much more genuine than the popular kids and offered more emotional support than the cliques did. A few of them were real wackos though. Emotional problems and family problems combined with a feeling of derision towards and from the school body is, dare I say, explosive.

    As one of the kids who never really belonged to the "popular crowd" I found that it made me not just an outcast among my peers but also among certain teachers. If I was being picked on or made fun of in class there were certain teachers that would snicker along with the kids. It's amazing how much that'll kill a kid's spirit. My point is, is that in addition to these kids being nuts they were probably persuaded by the school body to continue being nuts. The solution to that? I don't know. It's not just the psycho's parents who need to be called into question but also the parents of the kids who probably openly made fun of them. It was told that these nuts singled out some of the jocks in their spree for revenge. It was also told that they singled out minorities which seems to me to be a power trip.

    Well, what it is is senseless violence. There were undoubtedly a number of factors that contributed to the states of mind of these kids but high school is a pressure-cooker and you just can't blame movies and video games for the lashing out of two kids. Maybe media is a factor but the bottom line is, for me, that these kids weren't in a vacuum, they were affected by the life and society around them. I want the world to look at that. Look at what people are doing to people and the attitudes that kids are growing up with.

    It's all horrifying and unbearable but, for me, not unfathomable.

ADDENDUM: This little piece I wrote doesn't really explain how I feel. I thought I'd take another stab at it but I found someone else who said it better and said what I wanted to say. Read Shelley.