From the very first day this story has read like a movie in progress. The opening images of two boys in black, two gothic young men with thin faces, black raincoats and high-powered rifles suddenly burst into the crowded steamy lunch room of a goliath urban mid-American school. They have a list. But before they shot they make the charges. Prom Queen! Pow! Christian shit! Pow! Football jock! Pow! Cheerleader! Pow! And they created their own little special effects film clip. Then they brought the film to an end. They shot themselves. Very tidy. Well scripted. A beginning. A middle. And an end. A solid moral premise. Which was: we are finally finished putting up with these sick shit high school demi-gods. We are willing to die ourselves to have this one moment of reversing the score board. “Prom Queens and Sports Jocks 0 — Alienated Outcasts 29.”
But now the drama has turned into a bad mini-series. An endless “as the world turns.” Nobody is down in the well yet but I expect it. Eric and Dylan would not be surprised, I am sure, that the parents of these “popular” kids have gone into complete melt-down. The most tasteless disgusting incident so far I think is the public suicide of the mother of a girl with a spinal injury.
She went into a pawn shop, asked for a gun and shot herself. Didn't even pay for the gun. And left that poor guy a mess to clean up. And what about her kid? If that gunshot wound only crippled her body her nasty mother has now finished the job and crippled her mind.
Last week a press conference was called to announce that the family of Dylan was suing the police department for not informing them that their kid was in bad company when he was hanging out with Eric. Or was it the other way around? Anyway — the point is somebody has got be to blame. Not us! say the parents of Eric the Bold and Dylan the Demonic. One of them was adopted, I think. Surely they can sue the adoption agency. Or already have. I don't keep up.
I am certain there are guys out there designing the Columbine tv series. This is great stuff. Much better than Jon Benet Ramsey where nothing ever happens. They call a press conference every week to deplore the National Inquirer for asking such uncomfortable questions and to announce that they are working hard on leads and nothing has happened. Not to mention they seemed quite certain that mom wrote the ransom note. Her handwriting can not be RULED out. No movie on this case, but Columbine is the perfect soap opera.
Now here’s the thing. The massive corrupt federal system that originally was created to educate our children but now functions primarily as warehousing for inconvenient and un-welcome minors — that system is ending. Without a doubt. Do you imagine that these shootings are now over? That high schools are now safe? That this was simply an aberration? A fluke? An isolated series of events that have no root? No cause? Do you imagine it is just like the blonde talking head on the news is saying this morning after the nasty selfish little suicide? “Another tragedy! How much more can the people of Littleton take?” Is that what you think is going on? Just an unfortunate series of accidental events?
No, my dear. This is critical mass — Meltdown of the public high school system. Just desserts. What goes around is now coming around. Heavy duty.
We can expect another winter of serial high school murder. Committed by the brains. The nerds. The fat kids. The ugly kids. The poor ratty looking sharp faced pale kids who smell bad. The dumb kids. The clumsy, non-athletic kids. The non-Christian kids. Because these high schools have become a world all by themselves. The are exactly like prisons. Not a thing to do with real life except it teaches you that at the core of it there are some very nasty people out there. Because they all had to be in high school and they are now adults and they are probably as nasty as they were as young adults. Luckily these creeps who peak in high school and made a vocation out of making those four pathetic years a misery for the rest of us. Just luckily they usually fall flat on their pretty faces out in the real world. Because they never get what they got in high school again. Complete power. Beauty. Adulation. They just assume they deserved all that.
Of course they didn't. And it will never come again. So they turn fat if they are girls and drunk and fat if they are boys. Selling real estate if they are lucky. Birthing fat ugly white children who can never live up to how popular they themselves were way back at Middleton High.
Here is the truth. A selfish yuppie bitch killed herself because her cheerleader daughter wasn't perfect anymore. Her perfect yuppie life wasn't perfect anymore. She had a cripple to deal with. Her daughter moved her toes. So eventually she will walk again. But of course she will never walk like mom wants her to walk. She’ll never look like mom wants her to look. She will always draw attention on the street. The kind of attention the cripples draw. Unpleasant stares from rude children. Mock sympathy from thoughtless adults. So just walking wasn't going to do it for mom. Her pretty little girl is forever a cripple no matter how you look at it.
So she punished that girl. She blew her own brains out on the floor of a pawn shop. And that girl who may have not felt to blame until yesterday most certainly believes today that she killed her mother. She survived getting shot up at school but whether she can survive her nasty mean-spirited mother… that is another story.
Eric and Dylan. They took the fall, but they weren't the only ones in on this. They went out there and finally did it. For all of us. All of us who were laughed at in high school. All of us who could not make pep club, who were not on the football team, who could not or would not cheerlead. All of us who were not in the cute pictures in the yearbook, who were not elected prom king or even Sadie Hawkins queen (and this was left for the cute but slutty kind of girl.). For all of us who did not have long lists beside our name in the yearbook. Eric and Dylan did it for us. They did what millions of brains and nerds and sluts and outsiders all dreamed of doing long ago — way back past when I went to high school.
Maybe in the 40s everything was cool. So they say. They were happy to go to school in 40s because otherwise they would be digging up fucking potatoes or sliding around in cowshit. And they didn't get to go to school all that much. I think my dad got to the sixth grade then they needed him to stay home and sit on cow’s necks while the big cowboys whacked their balls off — that kind of thing. But I know this: by the time I got to high school it was just about the same as jail. Worse.
At least in jail you can walk around. In high school you’ve got to sit in a fucking chair for eight hours. And nobody can do that. If they can do that and not freak out they can get out of high school and go sit in an office somewhere for eight hours. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do any of it. Not sports. Not cheerleading. Not any of it.
I wanted to wear a beret and carry Howl. I had a pint of Smirnoff in my locker. By 2nd period I was on my way to mental shut down. I hated those people. Eric and Dylan knew who they were going after: Christians. Cheerleaders. Football stars. You know the ones. And they had it coming. They have had it coming for a long time. I myself am in my 50s and those fuckers had it coming when I was in Grand County High School in Moab, Utah, in 1960. Of course what Eric and Dylan did not know because they are too young to know is that their day was coming and those high school kings and queens — they were peaking right then and their days of glory would end right after they marched on the stage in their polyester gowns, white sox and Nikes. They are mostly losers. They think they are god incarnate at 16 so when they hit the real world they never recover.
But how can you tell the Dylans and Erics that? They don't care. Because for them High School is what they are living and without a doubt it is a major nightmare. Certainly it pushed a needle full of heroin into my arm. Could have been fatal. I recovered, but it is fatal to many. High School kills the spirit in more than one way.
And now it is ending. How long will parents send their children off to not be educated in a place where they could be killed on any day? On any day that some outsider decides they have heard the last snigger? The last laugh now.
A kid at Columbine the other day said he thought he would finish what Eric and Dylan started. And some kid will. Maybe not at Columbine but at another school. The only to way to end it is to shut down the system. Because the system of forcing these large packs of kids together without the natural balance of adults as a balancing factor is what caused this to happen. Warehousing of children caused the death of these children and it will continue to cause more deaths.
It ain't getting better till you fix what's wrong.
As an early escapee from highschool prison, I barely attended anyway. I have long deplored the brainwashing “socialization” system of K-12 indoctrination. A ready alternative, viable employment at entry level jobs in technical fields available in heavily funded aerospace industries then afforded me the “career path” that at least endowed me with sufficient wherewithal to not conform to the social expectations of the day.
Foreseeing the lifelong battle ahead of me as a parent, forced to protect my progeny from the inflictions of self-incrimination endured by the masses of helpless children in the hands of administrators and “teachers” of mindless creeds, I eschewed the path of motherhood, instead investing in the children of close friends and community members whose lives were forever burdened with the dilemma of home schooling brilliant and independent sons and daughters, constantly besieged with the demands to “participate” in “normal” activities demonstrating their pliability and capitulation to behavioral standards having nothing to do with intellectual and moral maturity.
Surveying the remnants of today’s global culture, witnessing the helplessness of the general public, disenfranchised in 2016 by a political machine that today wants to sell its warped wares like street vendors hawking fake Rolexes and used condoms (Betsy DeVos, for fuck’s sake?), I’m always grateful to the publishers of the AVA, and the company of its reader-writers with unflinching resistance to the status “quo.”
To whom does the sky belong? Not us, as we have learned. Our bodies, our selves? Get real. And, my favorite, the mantra of “mental health”: Each mind matters. The machine that grinds out defective mutant miscreants (Jim Jones, Donald Trump) cannot be dismantled by peasant democracy. God save the king, and always look on the bright side of life, eh?
Love from Upper Lake.