Susan Klebold has written an essay for O Magazine and for the first time we can hear the voice of one of the Columbine Shooters’ mothers. It is I very painful voice to hear and I was shocked how quickly it brought me back to my early adolescents and that April day when I was attending my final months of middle school only twenty miles away from the carnage. That day is impressed upon my mind in a way that is unrivalled by any other public event in my life, including the 11th of September Attacks. For me, as for many of my peers I believe, Columbine was the day everything changed.
Suddenly I was part of a wounded community which, instead of acting with grace and love, acted like a wounded animal desperate to strike out and place blame. The shooters, who were just other children in that high school, were painted as monsters and their parents as inept at best and criminally negligent at worst. The mega-church pastors who quickly took to leading the public mourning assured their flocks that the killers where in Hell (along strangely with many of their victims) and that those who had accepted “Jesus as their Saviour” were the only among the dead now in the arms of their Creator. Good and evil, Heaven and Hell, these became the dichotomies that defined the aftermath of the shooting and no one seemed willing or able move beyond them. Unlike the Amish community at the West Nickel Mines who would reach out in forgiveness to the family of the grown man who slaughtered their daughters, my natal community shunned and vilified the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Later it would rally against Marilyn Manson and trench coats, seeking to blame everything and everyone accept us. It was watching the reaction to the Columbine Shooting that prepared me for the reaction of my nation after the 11th of September; I already knew the drill: Retaliation with no room for self-reflection.
I though cannot move past thinking about Dylan and Eric and the ways that they were failed and reading the words of a mother who is clearly still grieving brings me even closer to those thoughts. I was four years younger than Eric and Dylan on the day of the shooting. Today I am six years older than they were then. In a few months I will be a decade older than their youngest victims. They all were my peers then but the passage of time allows me now to see them as the children they and I truly were. In the ten years that has passed, I have done so many things that none of the children who died a Columbine will ever get to do. I have graduated from high school and then university. I have fallen in love and had my heart broken. I have danced until dawn on four continents. I have seen the world beyond the Denver suburbs. I have seen that the high school cheerleaders and mega-church pastors are not the only people in the world. I wonder if Dylan and Eric would have felt differently if they had known this too, if they had only know how changeable their situation was. Even then, they were failed. And we, as a community, were the ones who failed them. They were our children too which is why I am glad that Dylan’s mother has finally spoken.
2 responses so far ↓
db // October 15, 2009 at 4:46 pm |
In my experience with multiple foster, temporary and surrogate families growing up, I noticed a disturbing trend toward denial, self-deception, and covering up in the name of preserving an image which placates the ego and causes others at least not to be suspicious of you– that is to say, the preservation of an idealized image can be more important than admission of the truth, admission of atrocious, abusive behavior, etc. admission of such things to others invites gossip, scorn, and humiliation. admission of such things to yourself can be a terrifying prospect — who wants to seriously be faced with the possibility of being an abject failure? I’m not saying this to crap on anyone, and I thank everyone very much for their support, but I can fully believe that Dylan’s mom had no idea he was planning to slaughter his classmates. never, ever underestimate the power of denial. the same denial that has women married to the nelliest queens, the same denial that has ushered thousands of gays into the Catholic priesthood, the same denial that let’s us (Americans) sit smugly above the fray, judging harshly the actions of others while the turning a blind eye to our own history of systematic genocide, corruption, and plutocracy.
Laurie Sweeney // February 27, 2010 at 10:14 pm |
Thank you for taking the time to comment at Navigating the Maze. You helped me crystalize more of my thinking, which I posted on my blog,