Remembering Columbine

Five years ago two young men walked into Columbine High School with murder in their hearts. They killed 12 students and 1 teacher before ending their own lives. With the United States still reeling from the massacre on September 11th and the subsequent war on foreign terror, the home-grown terror gets a back seat in the public consciousness.

Much has been written about the root causes of Klebold and Harris' pathology that lead them to kill. Some say the relentless bullying and state of social outcast prompted their killing rage. This gives me pause to reflect on my own life in High School.

In spite of my size, I was almost always an outcast, and target of bullying. It wasn't until I moved to Logos, a school specifically for those who were failing in traditional schools, that I found myself off the bottom rung of the social ladder. Adulthood has erased most of the memories of pain. Frankly the pain of adult life has eclipsed what I felt in High School, but if the child is the father of the man, then who I am now is related to who I was then.

I too, had one close friend then, a guy named Jay with whom I still have a relationship with, though not as close. We were both endlessly harassed at Brentwood High School. I don't remember being beat up very often, but the stress of verbal taunts commensurate with being the lowest caste of the youth society took a heavy toll.

Neither Jay nor I ever actively fantasized about murdering our classmates, but could easily develop a list of people whom we wouldn't mind never seeing again. Neither Klebold nor Harris deserve any particular dispensation because they were rejected by their peers. That stipulated, the fact that nobody at Columbine deserved to die does not negate the fact that the social environment at High Schools are, by my experience, extraordinarily toxic.

A year or two ago I attended a lecture by Elliot Aronson. He had written a book Nobody Left to Hate. In it he described convincingly the fertile ground these bitter fruits spring from. Schools are highly competitive places, and no premium is placed on cooperation save for the occasional joint science or history project. Kids stratify and coagulate into groups which rigidly protect themselves from loss of status, the easiest way being to limit membership and divert inevitable negative attention away from themselves onto a person or group in a lower caste.

Aronson has a solution, but it is a long term one. He suggests projects in the early years that force kids to cooperate. These activities are structured in such a way that there is a significant penalty if say, four kids out of a group of six gang up on the remaining two. By nuturing interdependency, over time, the kids develop empathy for all.

Future Columbines won't be prevented until the culture that breeds the hatred is dealt with. For more information see jigsaw.org.

Tim McNabb