| June 2, 1998 |
I have no pert theories on why we're seeing such devastating violence among the young. It likely stems from a number of different variables, which will be teased apart by psychologists and used as supportive evidence for various political agendas for many years to come. For those of us who are mercifully free of the crushing unpleasantness of going to school every day, theories are a convenient way of distancing ourselves from what we already know. You and I are fascinated by these kinds of events because, at a painful age of utmost suffering, locked deep within the artificial construct of the scholastic feeding chain, we might have entertained the most transitory thought of how satisfying it might feel to have our revenge on our perceived tormentors.
Why not just admit it? There are few creatures on earth with the ability to be as willfully and unsqueamishly cruel as the young person. For many of you, those people made daily life into a kind of Lord of the Flies with backpacks and band instruments. It was as if you were loaded on a spaceship with these completely arbitrary other kids, and blasted off for a twelve-year journey to the mythic planet of Adulthood. They could make you feel like you should never have been born because they didn't like the way your gym shorts fit. Every stage of your sexual development was on painful display before them, and the first awakenings of your desire took place under their shared gaze. Being too smart, or dumb, or pretty, or ugly, or poor, or rich, and too anything was like God had painted a fat red target on your chest and ordered that you receive unending abuse. School could be a giant fucking nightmare with absolutely no hope of getting better for years and years to come. You deserved better. Maybe you thought about various ways out. It's perfectly understandable if you indulged in a daydream or two in which you allowed that desperation to bloom into images of vindication, perhaps even vengeance.
Go on, let yourself remember. I assure you that merely admitting you felt the kick of fetal violence within you is not the same as condoning horrific acts of terrorism among young people. But be warned: you may be less able to manage that shocked, incredulous look when another kid who is just a little more screwed-up than you were follows through on what you and thousands of others thought about doing.
When I was preparing to be a Boy Scout, I got a magazine called Boy's Life. Every issue had a dramatic comic strip telling the true story of a brave act by a plucky young scout. Each week brought a new rescue: a fifteen year old diving into the lake to rescue his brother from the suction of the drainage pipe, a twelve year old heimliching his father at the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant as the hapless man gagged on a slice of his son's birthday cake. I can't tell you how much I wanted to be the hero of one of those strips. I imagined all sorts of horrifying disasters - explosions, car wrecks, encounters with violent strangers - in which my true, heroic colors would be unfurled for all to see. People whom I held responsible for making school such a shitty experience frequently met unpleasant ends in these glorious daydreams, or were at least horribly wounded and then magnanimously saved by me.
It was very... television, just like the real killings.
What we mourned as tragic but isolated events are becoming so run-of-the-mill that, like the crime novel and the exercise video, assassinating your peers has emerged as a genre in its own right. And as with those other new forms of expression, we're getting a pretty good sense of the future of the medium. It's painfully bright, lit in a volley of muzzle-flashes from young people who are finding a stunning new vocabulary to scream the message that you only whispered shamefully to yourself.