Can't really add much to this.
May. 13th, 2009 01:34 pmvia ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ceruleanst and naamah_darling
There's been a lot of talk on my flist about bullying and the way that children handle it versus the way adults handle it, and the rather shitty way that kids are generally told to just deal with it, or ignore it. Pretty insightful stuff, actually.
And it ties into the things that were posted today about the Columbine shooters. I suggest giving both these posts a read, as well as the article.
Ten years after Columbine, it comes out that Harris and Klebold were not the misfits they were made out to be.
And she isn't wrong.
ceruleanst and naamah_darlingThere's been a lot of talk on my flist about bullying and the way that children handle it versus the way adults handle it, and the rather shitty way that kids are generally told to just deal with it, or ignore it. Pretty insightful stuff, actually.
And it ties into the things that were posted today about the Columbine shooters. I suggest giving both these posts a read, as well as the article.
Ten years after Columbine, it comes out that Harris and Klebold were not the misfits they were made out to be.
Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren't on antidepressant medication and didn't target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers' journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.
So whom did they hope to kill?
Everyone — including friends.
What's left, after peeling away a decade of myths, is perhaps more comforting than the "good kids harassed into retaliation" narrative — or perhaps not.
It's a portrait of Harris and Klebold as a sort of In Cold Blood criminal duo — a deeply disturbed, suicidal pair who over more than a year psyched each other up for an Oklahoma City-style terrorist bombing, an apolitical, over-the-top revenge fantasy against years of snubs, slights and cruelties, real and imagined.
. . .
Harris, who conceived the attacks, was more than just troubled. He was, psychologists now say, a cold-blooded, predatory psychopath — a smart, charming liar with "a preposterously grand superiority complex, a revulsion for authority and an excruciating need for control."
Harris, a senior, read voraciously and got good grades when he tried, pleasing his teachers with dazzling prose — then writing in his journal about killing thousands.
"I referred to him — and I'm dating myself — as the Eddie Haskel of Columbine High School," says Principal Frank DeAngelis, referring to the deceptively polite teen on the 1950s and '60s sitcom Leave it to Beaver. "He was the type of kid who, when he was in front of adults, he'd tell you what you wanted to hear."
When he wasn't, he mixed napalm in the kitchen.
As he walked into the school the morning of April 20, Harris' T-shirt read: Natural Selection.
Klebold, on the other hand, was anxious and lovelorn, summing up his life at one point in his journal as "the most miserable existence in the history of time."
Harris drew swastikas in his journal; Klebold drew hearts.
As laid out in their writings, the contrast between the two was stark.
Harris seemed to feel superior to everyone — he once wrote, "I feel like God and I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me" — while Klebold was suicidally depressed and getting angrier all the time. "Me is a god, a god of sadness," he wrote in September 1997, around his 16th birthday.
Klebold also was paranoid. "I have always been hated, by everyone and everything," he wrote.
On the day of the attacks, his T-shirt read: Wrath.
"These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation," psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems."
So whom did they hope to kill?
Everyone — including friends.
What's left, after peeling away a decade of myths, is perhaps more comforting than the "good kids harassed into retaliation" narrative — or perhaps not.
It's a portrait of Harris and Klebold as a sort of In Cold Blood criminal duo — a deeply disturbed, suicidal pair who over more than a year psyched each other up for an Oklahoma City-style terrorist bombing, an apolitical, over-the-top revenge fantasy against years of snubs, slights and cruelties, real and imagined.
. . .
Harris, who conceived the attacks, was more than just troubled. He was, psychologists now say, a cold-blooded, predatory psychopath — a smart, charming liar with "a preposterously grand superiority complex, a revulsion for authority and an excruciating need for control."
Harris, a senior, read voraciously and got good grades when he tried, pleasing his teachers with dazzling prose — then writing in his journal about killing thousands.
"I referred to him — and I'm dating myself — as the Eddie Haskel of Columbine High School," says Principal Frank DeAngelis, referring to the deceptively polite teen on the 1950s and '60s sitcom Leave it to Beaver. "He was the type of kid who, when he was in front of adults, he'd tell you what you wanted to hear."
When he wasn't, he mixed napalm in the kitchen.
As he walked into the school the morning of April 20, Harris' T-shirt read: Natural Selection.
Klebold, on the other hand, was anxious and lovelorn, summing up his life at one point in his journal as "the most miserable existence in the history of time."
Harris drew swastikas in his journal; Klebold drew hearts.
As laid out in their writings, the contrast between the two was stark.
Harris seemed to feel superior to everyone — he once wrote, "I feel like God and I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me" — while Klebold was suicidally depressed and getting angrier all the time. "Me is a god, a god of sadness," he wrote in September 1997, around his 16th birthday.
Klebold also was paranoid. "I have always been hated, by everyone and everything," he wrote.
On the day of the attacks, his T-shirt read: Wrath.
"These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation," psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems."
Is it possible that people at that time just didn't want to admit what was staring them in the face the whole time? That society as a whole chose to try and place blame on video games, music, and books instead of where it should have been?
To quote![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
naamah_darling , "Yet the whole episode was used to justify even more cruelty, from students, from the teachers, from school systems themselves, against children who never had and never would do anything. It was used as an excuse to persecute and marginalize already suffering children. Because that's easier, better somehow, than admitting that the monster was in front of you the whole time, smiling, and you didn't fucking see it. It's easier than admitting that the worst ones, the very worst, very often show no sign of their monstrousness."
To quote
naamah_darling , "Yet the whole episode was used to justify even more cruelty, from students, from the teachers, from school systems themselves, against children who never had and never would do anything. It was used as an excuse to persecute and marginalize already suffering children. Because that's easier, better somehow, than admitting that the monster was in front of you the whole time, smiling, and you didn't fucking see it. It's easier than admitting that the worst ones, the very worst, very often show no sign of their monstrousness."And she isn't wrong.
