Thinking About Columbine High

American Politics Journal

Thinking About Columbine High
by Mac MacArthur

Thursday, April 22, 1999 --- New York (APJP) -- When CNN announced that there'd been a shooting at a suburban Denver high school, I said to my wife, "I'm taking all bets that the perpetrators are marginal kids."

That was an easy bet. Who else would get hold of numerous assault weapons and construct bombs -- all to get revenge on their schoolmates?

The lessons we might learn from the death of 15 students and faculty are many. Perhaps we can study the shooters' behavior and family life to learn how they were brought up. Maybe some behavioral psychiatrist will trace the trauma (if there were any) that programmed these kids to kill back in their formative years -- which I now understand are between birth and 3 years old. Perhaps a genetic biologist will compare their gene sets to those of Charles Manson or Adolf Hitler.

Who knows?

But of course, the focus of "puke" TV was on the parents and friends of the dead and severely wounded victims, and once they finished with them, they grabbed any kid they could lay their hands on that was at school that day to tell you what they saw as they successfully fled.

Already, we know that shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, engaged in targeting of minorities and "jocks," yelling things like "Take that," or "Surprise" after finding teenage girls cowering under library carrels in terror.

A bad movie? Or real life in 21st-century America?

However, there is another lesson to be learned here, and that is the high price of success in an atmosphere of greed and intolerance.

The actions by these black duster-coated thugs is no one-time matter. This is the sixth such shooting at our schools in less than two years. Something's up and some people are frightened -- but it may please you to know that the scared do not include gentle liberal minds. No, it's the zealous NRA cheerleaders, the "God" pushers, the "Christian Coalition" -- anything but Christian -- and a minority of Republican and even Democrat stooges in Congress who have set the stage for a battle between the haves and the have-nots, the accepted and the cannibalized, the strong and the weak.

In a world where the size of your bank account seems more important than the depth of your heart, it isn't difficult to understand what happened yesterday.

Here, in our America, even the President's compassion is made a mockery, and police are elevated to Lords of the Streets. We should expect some young, elastic, sick and overactive imaginations to adopt a persona of rough independence that will change into a nightmare film-noir where "the outcast" rides into town on a black horse and murders everyone whose ever made fun of his "Pa."

Columbine High is an upscale suburban school complete with blonde, blue-eyed cheerleaders and athletes who might have come out of the Kinderleben of Third Reich Germany. There are a smattering of blacks, native Americans, and hispanics -- all attempting to be white by dressing white, styling their hair white and talking white except in their most private moments.

Then there are the shooters.

They were always shooters. Even in third grade, they brought toads to school and snapped bra straps and fought with rocks at construction sites. No one ever got badly hurt. It was a game. These shooters grew older and as they passed from grade to grade they were left out, probably more and more with each passing year. Perhaps it was at home that they were alone. Perhaps at school as they yearned for attention reserved only for the prettiest or most handsome. Perhaps they were mentally unbalanced even in third grade and finally found each other by the tenth.

Whatever happened, it happened to two mwmbers of what is reported to be a "mafia" of as many as 20 young men who gave up on life, the law, this country, their parents -- and everyone they knew around lunch time Tuesday.

Where did they get the idea to slaughter everyone that had "made it"? Was it from films and television, as moronic former Vice President Dan Quayle would have you believe? Was it from the "Death of Outrage" as self-appointed conscience of America, demagogue William Bennett, preaches? Was it from prior shootings that made such exciting "news" on bottom-scraper cable stations like MSNBC or the Fox News Channel?

Sure. It was a combination of all those things mixed with a healthy dose of insanity.

But 20 boys? Figure it out for yourselves: a full 1% of the kids in that high school were verging on homicidal mania on Monday -- and 10% of those opened fire on Tuesday. If there are 50 million teens in America, that means that 500 thousand of them are nearly ready to take aim -- and that 5,000 will.

So what is it that's changed for these boys born in the Reagan years? What's so different about them than me, born in the Truman years? Did something so cataclysmic happen that this nation has produced half a million maniacs? Perhaps so, and despite the pleading defensiveness you'll hear from the ultra right, I submit to you that what happened was the abandonment of the "marginal American" for the supposed "good" of the whole.

Well, you reap what you sow.

Chances are that the two shooters were highly intelligent. They did not move through life unaware of what was going on around them. Yet this awareness did not result in examination and adoption of some finely honed philosophy. Instead, it resulted in a violent lashing out that took more than a dozen innocent lives.

What did they see -- and then miscompute -- that the other kids didn't?

Maybe it was a ruthless Republican congress murdering a President's future using a systematic set of trumped-up indictments that failed to be proved.

Maybe it was the wholesale abandonment of people like them -- unable to cope with 21st Century socioeconomics which allow snake oil salesmen like Pat Robertson to grow wealthy beyond belief on the backs of demented, frightened people who crave to be "saved" before they meet their maker.

Perhaps it was the densified destruction of what Pat Buchanan called the "Welfare State" and the proceeding erection of a "SlaveFare" state in which people who can't even read are made to toss french fries at Burger King for less than $140 a week in order to support their kids.

Maybe it was the stunning realization that nothing those kids ever did or said or would ever think would count.

Or perhaps it was this: the uncertain feeling that nothing much made sense in America any longer and that they could not rely on laws passed by men who did not hesitate to twist those laws into personal and political gain.

Was it the worship of our brilliant war machine, or our men in blue outfitted like war machines that transformed those kids into ninjas from Hell? Was it Waco? Was it millions of Kosovars in tent-camps crying as we patted each other on the back for feeding them slop?

You see, they didn't remember FDR, or Harry Truman or Jack Kennedy or even LBJ. They never listened to Jimmy Carter and they tuned out Bill Clinton long ago. They heard only vicious jokes about Bobby and Ted Kennedy. They never heard a line spoken by Martin Luther King. The didn't know men of compassion, who even if misled still worked for good and not evil. They never marched for anything pure or good and they never saw anyone they knew do that either.

What they did know was the era of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. They knew who the lying, felonious Newt Gingrich was, and what he stood for. They heard that Henry Hyde was an adulterer as they watched him together with Kenneth Starr, a poor excuse for a man, out-and-out lynch a sitting President because Starr wanted to sit on the Supreme Court.

They saw the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, in his operetta-inspired robe gilded with gold at his bidding to make himself more regal. They saw Bob Barr speak against sin and then found that Barr was a serial sinner himself. They listened to Charles Canady lecture the nation on morality and then learned that Canady was immoral.

And last month, they witnessed the President, a man of peace, pressured into launching a reign of terror on a nation 4,000 miles from home -- just as the ultra right loves to do -- and then, just as he did it, get pilloried, by them, for not carpet bombing the entirety of Yugoslavia into oblivion -- in minutes rather than weeks.

In short, my friends, those teenage assassins saw sanctioned hypocrisy at such outlandish levels that their heads spun. They saw that there was no room for forgiveness in this world any longer.

"I can't take it anymore," one of them must have said.