A note to the Trouble Youth of America
In the week following the Columbine shootings, I and somebody else was looking at a graph print-out from Yahoo or some such entity, which essentially listed the various prominent school shooting incidents. The most prescient observation was simply,
“They all happen during the Spring.”
“The sun comes out, the seaon changes, the kids are brimming with new energy and vitality that is hard to contain, and cannot be contained. They get itchy fingers.”
I did not say that, by the way.
Years have passed; trends have shifted. These days, every year on April 20th, the news is brimming with accounts of students throughout the nation who were preparing, or threatening, to “Celebrate the anniversy of Columbine”.
Hm. John Wilkes Booth’s grave-site is a tourist destination shrine for a type of “The South Shall Rise Again” neo-Confederate. So, this makes the sense that it makes.
Palo Alto police have identified five suspects and are interviewing other students believed responsible for spray-painting swastikas and references to Columbine High School at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School.
Five eighth-graders at the school have been or will be suspended, Principal Don Cox said.
Although graffiti had popped up at school for six weeks, the weekend references to Columbine set off alarm bells. “It made us go into police mode, where we were checking out any lead we had,” said detective Marianna Villaescusa, the police department’s school resource officer. “We’ve been non-stop at the school.”
Today is the seventh anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., where two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 26 others, then shot themselves in the school library. Investigators have determined that the Columbine threats were not credible, Villaescusa said. Interviewers believe one of the taggers, a boy, had a fascination with scaring people.
At least one of the taggers was a girl, Cox said.
“Fascination with scaring people.” Stating the obvious is a bit cumbersome, but I believe the point attempted is that they were not planning on carrying something out. That differs from a hub-bub north of Fairbanks, Alaska:
Six middle school students in a small Alaska town were arrested Saturday on suspicion of plotting to bring guns and knives to school to kill their classmates and faculty.
The students had planned to disable North Pole Middle School’s power and telephone systems, allotting time to kill their victims and escape from North Pole, a town of 1,600 people about 14 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Police Chief Paul Lindhag said.
The seventh-graders wanted to seek revenge for being picked on by other students, Lindhag said. They also disliked staff and students, he said.
“Middle School”ers. 8th graders or 7th graders. A little math, and that would mean that they were in 1st grade or Kidnergarten when Columbine happened. Which means their perspective of that incident is a little bit too narrow here. In a perverted sense I guess they have a bit more excuse than the Columbine killers — they were one month from graduation and thus should have seen their out here; our middle school squirts have what is thus far a third of their life to go from being out of what is in their mind the K-12 prison complex
Look. This is directed to Miscreant and Disenchanted Troubled Youth. You have nothing to gain from emulating the Columbine Murderers. Even if I grant you some bone in a fascination with mass murderers, they fall far short in this category. Charles Mansion. He had some prescient and very dark philosophical comments to make regarding human nature, and some ability to hold onto people’s imaginations through religious memes. I think there’s probably some troubled loner figure on any number of high school campuses reading “Helter Skelter”. Ted Kaczynski. There’s a certain nobility to dropping completely out of society. And I think everybody has a bit of neo-Ludditism to them. Adolf Hitler. Something about a short, funny-looking misfit who seeks to create a “Master Race” swarming of a type of tall muscular Aaryans nothing like the “Leader”.
Wait. I’m moving a bit too far aswarm. The middle school graffiti in Palo Alto included Swastikas. But even there, they only served to reinforce the “Columbine” myth — 4/20, Hitler’s Birthday, blah blah blah, early news reports connected the two things, whether they were really tied or not is now beside the point.
Columbine… that, within the public imagination, is just a bunch of bad acne cream and a short fuse away from being locked in the gym locker room. There’s no style points with that. I go back to an interview Rick Emerson had on his show with Larry Bagby, promoting the movie “Saints and Soldiers”. Emerson apologized while asking for a short description of the movie, acknowledging that that’s a bit difficult sometimes and mocked the the high-concept mode for simplistic movies and shows — “MTV Cops” for Miami Vice. Bagby joked, “Well… My film is ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ with Guns.” Rick’s response, “No. That movie was called ‘Columbine'”, followed by “Oh. Don’t act like you’re all outraged.”
It’s like that. This just isn’t going to get you anywhere, kiddies. Just… try a different path entirely. And… keep your grades up.