Miniature crosses are displayed to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings at Clement Park April 20, 2009 in Littleton, Colorado. Columbine was the site of the then deadliest school shooting in modern United States history. (Marc Piscotty, Getty Images)
It’s been ten full years since Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire and murdered 12 students and one teacher and injured 23 more people before taking their own lives.
Ten years and it feels like yesterday.
Ten years and it feels like a lifetime ago.
It’s weird. I still remember that day so clearly. My sister and I were transfixed by the television coverage. It seems like the coverage went on for weeks. Nothing but death, destruction, analysis, experts, victims, rinse, repeat.
The massacre happened, experts said in the weeks that followed April 20, 1999, because the boys were obsessed with violent movies like Natural Born Killers. It happened because the boys played Grand Theft Auto. It happened because the boys had absentee parents, parents so wrapped up in their own lives that they had no idea their boys were collecting guns and ammunition and building bombs in the garage. It happened because the boys were bullied for years and years on end. It happened because the boys, one, maybe both, were crazy, crazy and depressed and suicidal, undiagnosed, overmedicated, under-medicated. They probably listened to Nine Inch Nails. Or maybe Marilyn Manson made them do it.
Every few years the case would hit the news and my senses, my memories of that day would be reawakened.
So naturally I’m kind of surprised I was caught as off guard as I was Monday morning when the deluge of new information, revelations and opinions hit the airwaves, the newspapers and the blogosphere. I had no idea there was a major anniversary coming up.
Ultimately, what’s especially unnerving to me today is that despite the new round of analysis, the new search for reason and meaning, there is nothing new. It seems that many out there are still trying to answer the why, still trying to make sense of it. Many of the old theories have been abandoned, and people are left to blame that most intangible but faithful cause for all the bad things that happen in the world: evil.
Leonard Pitts, for example, is one of those people.
In his column he says there is no reason for the massacre other than the evil of the killers. Klebold and Harris, Pitts says, “unleashed hell … a firestorm.”
Pitts goes on, in essence to say that what Klebold and Harris did was so heinous, the two boys so devoid of any redemptive value, that evil is all that is left.
“I will not begrudge you if you seek the rhyme or reason in what those boys did, but as for me, I will give them not an hour of my one and only life trying to comprehend their incomprehensible deed,” Pitts said.
He uses evil as an excuse to dismiss any discussion that might lead to understanding, that might help us all to help someone else so as to avoid another Columbine.
I know, naïve, right? In light of what happened at Virginia Tech, that one-room school house in Pennsylvania, the immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. and every other act of seemingly inexplicable violence to have occurred since Columbine and those that have yet to occur but certainly will, it must sound quaint of me.
I’m just not willing to accept that a little red man with horns and a tail and who lives among fire and brimstone made anyone do anything. While I believe there are plenty of acts that are evil, I’m not sure I believe that people are born innately evil.
That, apparently, is what Pitts believes.
To me, intellectually, that doesn't make sense.
But I still need an explanation. I need to know that these people are damaged beyond belief, that they are crazy, out of their minds with depression, pain, mental illness coursing through their veins.
I need for there to be a diagnosis.
I'll even concede that just because we can put a name on it doesn’t mean that we can cure it. And don't get me wrong: It certainly doesn't excuse any behavior.
It just is what it is. And it deserves more of our time, not less.
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i think if you read the boys writings, and see the things they said and wrote and thought- you would know that they were really disturbed. yet still, who is THAT disturbed that they want to kill so many people?!?!?
ReplyDeletei wrote about c-bine yesterday too. barely anyone commented. it's like no one cares.
http://jennnster.blogspot.com/2009/04/10-years-later.html
This happened when I was in high school. At the time, I was puzzled by the paranoid reactions of our faculty.
ReplyDeleteColumbine is one high school out of thousands in this country. Those sociopaths were two students out of millions. As a high school student in 1999, I was more likely to get struck by lightning.
I think that if you can project fears of an isolated incident that took place a thousand miles away onto your own enviornment, you're watching too much television.