10 Years ago I getting dressed for musical rehearsal. We were having difficulty singing and dancing. Newscasters said feared that 50-200 people were dead.
Clebold, Harris and their victims were my age, and only lived a few miles away. I did know one Columbine student personally, and she got away unscathed. Looking back, I’m struggling to see what has really changed.
School security is probably taken a little more seriously. Trench coats and metal music took on new stereotypes. Teenage depression, for awhile at least, seems to have been taken a little more seriously.
I never bought that Marilyn Manson had anything to do with Columbine. The shooting, and its copycats are symptoms of something more basic.
Chap Clarks’s ethnographic study Hurt delves into a suburban high school. “Adolescence” is a 15 year process. 50% of marriages end in divorce. Mandatory testing begins in third grade. Youth sports are hyper-competitive. The list goes on. Without families or institutions to turn to, you make up your own rules. Kids, feeling abandoned by their families and culture, have created their own, dark, dangerous, underground world.
Columbine and its descescendants are the result of a culture that has abandoned its children. What can we do to embrace them again?
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