Hello everyone. My apologies for the gap in posting; lots going on in other realms, and those responsibilities would not wait.

Meanwhile, I’ve read some interesting writing. Check out Mr. T’s Human Nature Blog “The Rawness” on the modern, urban male here.

Journalist Dave Cullen recently published a book about the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.  I listened to the audio version at Audible.com. It was well-produced, and read by the excellent narrator Don Leslie.

In the spring of 1999, two high school seniors killed thirteen of their classmates with guns, before shooting themselves at the school. They’d planned to kill many more, and only failed because their bombs did not detonate on time. The boys were white and upper-middle-class. They lived in large, comfortable houses and came from intact families.

I wanted to know what Cullen found out about this horrible event in the ten years he wrote about it. How did these children of privilege become so bitter, so young? Did they exhibit any warning signs beforehand? Could anything be done to prevent this kind of tragedy?

These questions are the only pertinent subjects for a book on Columbine. Unfortunately, Cullen spends a great deal of his time elsewhere, recounting the mistakes in news reporting in 1999, which are frankly irrelevant now.

When he gets to the big questions, Cullen’s expert sources tell him that one shooter, Eric Harris, was a psychopathic personality, adept at deception and essentially marked for mayhem from birth. His accomplice, Dylan Klebold was merely a frustrated, depressed teenager, who might never have acted out, but for Harris. Klebold unluckily formed the closest friendship of his life with a psychopath, and went down with him.

Both Harris and Klebold behaved badly long before the murders. Harris published a personal web site, where he threatened violence repeatedly. Both boys were arrested a year before they died. Neither their parents nor local law enforcement took adequate measures to protect the larger community from the boys’ misanthropic ambitions. Cullen’s experts point out that psychopaths are brilliant actors. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on those who, in retrospect, might have recognized the warning signs. I had some sympathy for this point of view, knowing how difficult a parent’s position can be.

But the boys did not fool everyone in their community. Randy and Judy Brown, whose son Brooks Brown knew both boys, called the police many times, asking them to search Eric Harris’s house, promising they would find illegal guns and bombs in his room. The police never searched the house, and the Browns’ complaints were not taken seriously by Eric’s parents. These failures raise more questions. Were Harris and Klebold a separate evil, unrelated to the culture they lived in? Or, were they partly products of their environment?

Ralph Larkin is a professor of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. His book, Comprehending Columbine takes a different approach to the big questions. Larkin disagrees with Cullen. His evidence indicates that other people did contribute to the killers’ state of mind:

Although it is said that [Harris and Klebold] hated everybody equally, that simply is not true. They did not hate adults, but they hated their peers for the humiliations they heaped upon them.

What form did this humiliation take? Harris and Klebold lived at the bottom of the Columbine High School social caste system. Those at the top—the star athletes—regularly insulted and assaulted them. According to their friend Brooks Brown, the complacency of the School Administration further injured the outcasts. Larkin documents Columbine’s inequality:

The state wrestling champ was regularly permitted to park his $100,000 Hummer all day in a 15-minute space. A footbal player was allowed to tease a girl about her breasts in class without fear of retribution by his teacher, also the boy's coach. The sports trophies were showcased in the front hall—the artwork, down a back corridor.

Larkin also points out that the Columbine community and high school population was majority protestant Christian, with strong evangelical student groups. Even so, several of their pastors cited a “godless culture” and the absence of prayer in school as causes for the murders.

The author closest to the killers, Brooks Brown, wrote his own book about them, No Easy Answers. , with the help of journalist Rob Merrit, when he was about twenty-one years old. Brown writes with surprising wisdom, for so young an author. Brown details the indignities visited on Harris and Klebold. He agrees with Larkin that rules were not enforced equally at Columbine High School. In Brown’s mind, this partly explains the future killers’ fascination with computer games:

When Eric and Dylan got into the world of video games, they loved it, because it was a world with definite rules. Those rules were present, and they could not be broken. For a young man in a world like ours, it was a godsend. In the real world, the rules change constantly—and you could be in trouble at a moment's notice. But video games are different.

Brown acknowledges that Harris was already “mentally inbalanced” when he came to Columbine, but his rejection by the social elite of the school amplified the danger in him and in Klebold:

People ask all the time why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did what they did on April 20, 1999. I believe it was hopelessness. They saw no real future for themselves, and no acceptance from those around them. They became self-hating. Then they started to hate those around them. Then they became angry, and then they became violent. Finally, in one insane, twisted moment, they believed they had power over a world that had kept them down.

If Columbine was an isolated incident, a freakish accident, we could dismiss it. Unfortunately, Harris and Klebold were not aliens from another planet. The published excerpts of their journals sound familiar notes of fear and frustration. Many of us have been where they were. I have been where they were. Brown’s use of the term “hopelessness” raises a broader tendency in humans, especially young people entering the adult world.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Triumph of Death, ca 1562

The Apocalyptic Urge

All of us experience fear. We question the difference between what we want and what we have. That tension affects our feelings about the larger world. We nurture hopes of how the world should be, and especially how it should treat us. Experience erodes these hopes; we learn that the world will not always treat us the way we’d like. Other people will not always recognize our greatness. We won’t always get what we want.  In fact, it is possible that we’ll never get what we want.

This fear of disappointment is especially painful for young people, who have no reservoir of experience to soften the blow. If a young man’s first, awkward advances are rejected by a girl he likes, his world crashes. It is easy for his elders to say, “You’re just starting. You’ll do better next time,” but not so easy for him. He lives in the painful present. In that moment, his entire romantic career is a failure. His current frustration and disappointment appear permanent features of a cruel world. He may despair, believing he will never get what he wants from life.

One response to these unsettling feelings is the desire to change the world. This possibility is immensely appealing to young people, who know so little about it—fear of the unknown being the worst kind—and whose fear of failure is so intense. It is no accident that many soldiers in religious and political mass movements are college students.  The promise of a better world soothes their fear of the present one; no need to compete and risk failure. They won’t play the game until the rules are rewritten in their favor.

Visions of Utopia revolve around one person’s guaranteed success. You can find every Utopian architect, sitting on the throne of his imaginary kingdom. Plato’s Republic will be ruled by a “Philosopher King.” Can you guess who this person would be?

The promise of a perfect tomorrow acts upon human initiative like an opiate on the human body. We feel momentary courage, followed by greater fear and weakness. The more we indulge in vague fantasies of the coming, Golden Age, the less we can tolerate the imperfect present. Soon, our increased discomfort pushes us to desperation: the world must be made over, and it must happen soon. Otherwise, there’s no hope for us. We are not particular now, about what form that change takes. We can tolerate anything, except living in the world as it is.

One way to change the world is to destroy it. Many people, driven by frustration, indulge this bitter fantasy. But the disaffected crusader cannot destroy the world on his own; it’s just too big. He can, however, destroy himself and several people around him. That will effectively end the world, as measured by his shrunken horizons.

This final solution often presents itself after a humiliating defeat. The residents of Jim Jones’s commune in Guyana killed themselves when their isolation collapsed [1978]. They knew American law enforcement would soon arrive. A similar dynamic was observed at the MOVE house in Philadelphia [1985] and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas [1993]. People outside the cults could not understand the followers’ refusal to surrender and save their own lives. For the followers, surrender meant more than a temporary defeat. They would be forced to give up their golden dreams of a better world, and return to the real, hostile and messy world they’d rejected. They might also be forced to admit that they’d been deceived by a talented con-artist, and their years with him had gone for nothing. Apparently, some people prefer death by fire, over those painful admisssions. They can die and still reject this present world; their death being the last, successful act of rejection. But surrender will involve accepting the world—at least partially. This is the one thing they’ve vowed never to do.

Lessons?

I’m always looking for the bottom line in any body of information. What can we do with it? I have a son starting school. I plan to tell him there is never just one way to get what you want. He needs to stay out of the downward spiral: The world is bad, if we don’t change it, we’ll never get what we want.

When he gets to high school, I hope I can impress upon him that high school is short, and largely unrelated to the rest of his life. Getting this message across will require creativity and luck; I may not succeed. He may disagree, but least he’ll have that thought in his head.