It’s been seven years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine high school in Littleton, CO, angry and armed to the teeth, and murdered a teacher and 12 of their schoolmates. Seven years, enough time so that, among the student population at least, there is no one left who was actually at the school on the day of the event. There was a quiet remembrance at Columbine high school to mark the day of the shootings, but have we really learned anything? I don’t think so.
American culture has always been violent. Going back to the first major U.S. motion picture (that’s Birth of a Nation folks), our media have depicted images of raw violence with absolutely no regard to what effect they might have on the viewer. But do our media encourage violence, or are media images violent because violent images sell? I don’t think it’s a question that can be answered, but the conclusions reached by a group of FBI analysts and psychiatrists about just why Harris and Klebold did what they did open a window on to something that is, I think, a much more evident problem in American culture.
According to an April 2004 article on Slate.com:
Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed “Trench Coat Mafia outcasts” were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them. The second conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable: We can never understand what drove them to such horrific violence.
But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached an entirely different conclusion. They believe they know why Harris and Klebold killed, and their explanation is both more reassuring and more troubling than our misguided conclusions….
The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia—click here to read more about Columbine’s myths—and to abandon the core idea that Columbine was simply a school shooting. We can’t understand why they did it until we understand what they were doing. [Emphasis from the original article]
A fascinating read, the article goes on to talk about the analysis, culled from hours of interviews with friends and family, hours of tape the boys made of themselves, and hundreds of pages of online and traditional journals, of Harris and Klebold’s personalities. The conclusion: that together Harris and Klebold were the perfect psychopath with delusions of grandeur. Young men that, together, were the center of the universe with absolutely no regard for anyone else’s right to exist. “It wasn’t just ‘fame’ they were after — Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term — they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power,” the article states.
Like a lot of Americans, I spent a good portion of my day not working, huddling around the TV and watching the situation in Colorado unfold live, kept on the edge by a lot of speculation and grainy helicopter-based photography. I admit that I’m one of the people who bought the idea that the shootings at Columbine were an act of revenge, a cry against what is essentially institutionalized torture for kids that were different. And while I’m willing to let go of the idea that Harris and Klebold had simply had enough, had gone for the nuclear option against a system that would give them no help and parents who didn’t seem to want to bother to stand up for them, I’m not willing to let go of the idea that systemized meanness is condoned in American culture. Why? Because it’s now become our defacto foreign policy.
America’s current relationship with the rest of the world is built on an us vs. them dichotomy that could only be made more clear if the government took the step of actually legislating segregation again. That us vs. them dichotomy, though, didn’t just spring full-blown from George W. Bush’s forehead the way Zeus birthed Athena. No, we’ve been getting that dichotomy fed to us in a steady drip by Madison Avenue for the past 50 years.
Marketing exists to create a demand for a product that, in reality, you probably don’t need. The way it creates that demand is by trying to convince you that you belong to some super-special subgroup that this product is just perfect for and that the only people who can have this product are members of that select elite. Us, the chosen, the ones destined to use this fabulous machine, wear these stylish clothes, or smear on this miraculous cream, versus them, the unfortunate, the ones with appliances where the nobs come off in your hand when you turn them on, the raggedy looking, the ones with wrinkles or zits or whatever the cream is supposed to cure.
Where this elitism and exclusionary behavior get systematized is when institutions, such as schools, treat those who represent the ideal differently than those who don’t. In American culture the ideal is still Christian, white, heterosexual, thin, beautiful, and athletic. Don’t believe me? Fine.
Find me a high school that has on its cheerleading squad a girl who is 5’5″ and weighs 275lbs.
Find me a high school where the student body president is an openly gay Jewish boy.
Find me a homecoming queen who doesn’t shave her underarms.
Not an easy thing to do, is it? It’s not just mainstream culture that promotes elitism and exclusionary practices, though.
My gay friends in DC are constantly complaining about how it’s impossible to get another guy even to talk to them if they’re not wearing the “right look.” Any hint of individuality is seen as a sign of weakness, a sign of “otherness.” And lesbians are no better, though our code for this stuff is a little bit less obvious with “professional lesbian” signifying “must be able to pass for straight” in the personal ads. And God forbid you be even the slightest bit butch, which is a whole set of exclusionary rules in and of itself, and be interested in someone like yourself instead of your opposite femme like you “should” be.
All of it, social codes, what’s cool and uncool, product marketing, and politics, the whole thing adds up to “I’m OK, and you suck” which, at its core, is just plain mean.
So if we’re doing this to ourselves, is it any wonder our government is trying to do it to the rest of the world? Terrorist/not-terrorist. Friend/enemy. Good/evil. All of these are dichotomies that are present in current political rhetoric. They keep us isolated and afraid. Cowed and unwilling to rock the boat (after all, you don’t unseat a sitting President during the middle of a war) for fear that if we do we’ll fall out and the big, bad shark with the razor sharp teeth that we just know is down there swimming circles underneath us in the inky-black water will bite us in half.
It is this fear reflex that is, I think, at the basis of the bulk of the exclusionary behavior in our culture. Can’t be seen at the geek table because what would your friends think? Can’t let anyone know you’re dating the fat girl because they’d think you’re a loser and can’t get anyone “better.” Can’t let “foreigners” into the country because they’ll steal “our” jobs. Can’t tolerate another’s sexual orientation because “it’s against God’s wishes.” (As if someone can personally know what God wants, but that’s a whole different issue) Can’t show any signs of difference because you’ll be excluded from the group. All of these can’ts and shouldn’ts are based in fear, fear of loss, fear of difference.
So, what happened to humanity’s supposed “higher brain” functions, you know, the ones that separate us from the animals and allow us to make judgments and decisions that aren’t based on the fight or flight reflex? When did we turn into such herd animals, afraid of the slightest variation in behavior or thought?
I don’t know, but I do know that if we don’t turn our brains on and start thinking, even to the minimal extent that we had been, our extermination as a species will come that much more rapidly and after a period of brutal chaos at which cultural and socio-political developments of the past decade have barely hinted.
Susan says
“I’m not willing to let go of the idea that systemized meanness is condoned in American culture.” I think you are right. It’s more than condoned – it’s encouraged, taught, nurtured.
You go on to speculate that it’s rising out of a fear reflex – fear of being different in any way. That I’m not so sure of…
My own feeling is that this comes from having moved away from or lost the value systems that provided ethical underpinnings, gave each us a sense of our own worth and a reason to help others. Instead, we’ve drifted over the past three or four generations, into a sort of every-man-for-himself way of life. We seem to have lost our sense of community and cooperation. Our sense of personal value seems now to reside in being better (i.e. richer, or more powerful) and having more than others – all of which engenders a sense of competition that is merciless.
We can’t exactly go back to old values – and in fact a lot of good things have also happened – many people and groups of people have a freedom that they didn’t have in the past. So…..where to from here?
Personally, I think people in general are good-hearted, and the job is to find ways to engage that good-heartedness, and not penalize it, as our sense of competition does.