It was an unthinkable tragedy. A moment that was almost, perhaps just short of, the kind that defines a generation, like September 11th or the Kennedy Assassination. I don't remember exactly what I was doing when I first heard the news, like I remember first hearing about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Yet, I remember it, and remember the aftermath.
Of course, school shootings were already nothing new. There had been numerous such shootings before Columbine, and there have been numerous school shootings since. There was one in Germany that had more victims, and there was another one at Virginia Tech that also proved even more deadly (it remains the deadliest school shooting in history).
Yet, Columbine was the one that had the biggest impact of them all (unless you remember the one in Scotland in the nineties, which also had a huge impact, but not as much in the United States as in Britain), and I am guessing this was mostly because of the shock value. There were a lot of oddities about that day, and the specifics relating to the story. Two kids, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, working together to produce a massacre. They had purposely chosen April 20th as the date, because it was Hitler's birthday, although one of the kids, Dylan Klebold, apparently was partly Jewish himself. The two boys, who were just a couple of months from graduating that very high school that they hated so much, had been severely picked on and bullied at times, yet they killed their victims seemingly randomly. Initially, there were reports that the killings had been because of something called the "Trenchcoat Mafia", yet as it turned out, it was just two neighborhood kids who had appeared perfectly normal just the day before, although the media would go on to scrutinize everything so much as to make the signs of impending massacre appear almost obvious. Obviously, the media did. What the media also managed to do was make it a live story, and we the viewing audience were given access to images of kids running out of the school in a panic, and of a kid crawling out of a window, and being yanked out to safety. Later, there were brief images of some of the actual shootings themselves. Perhaps the oddest thing about it was the scale of their plans. They hoped to kill 500 people in the school, and if they were able to escape, they wanted to make their way to Denver Airport, hijack a plane, and then fly it to Manhattan, where they would crash it into some buildings in the downtown - something that resonated and seemed rather eerie a just about two and a half years later, when terrorists would fly airplanes into the two tallest skyscrapers in the city - the Twin Towers.
What made Columbine unique were all these things, as well as the scale of it. Nothing quite like it had happened before. It was all of these strange points, and more, mentioned in the previous paragraph. Suddenly, everyone was paying attention to the long-term dangers of resentment from bullying and harassment, as if these things had been minor matters before, perhaps just part of life's unpleasant realities. After Columbine, all of that changed. Everyone was worried about copycat incidents. Suddenly, the possibility of your child being harmed in your neighborhood seemed very real, and security measures in countless schools were stepped up several notches. There were threats. There was even a school shooting about one month later near Atlanta. But nothing since has quite reached the scale of Columbine, where almost everything else -all the news of the world - seemed to halt briefly, for a week or two, while the nation discussed what had happened, and why, and what needed to be done now.
Sometimes, frankly, I wonder what made Columbine so unique. Yes, it was huge, and it was shocking. But let's be honest: mass shootings, with some crazy (or in this case, crazies) killing people seemingly at random, is nothing new in America. Particularly in 1999, when there seemed to be shootings all of the time, all over the place. I mentioned school shootings, but of course, they happen outside of school, as well. Think of some of the recent shootings (and these are only the recent shootings, within the last couple of years or so): the shootings in Arizona targeting Congresswoman Giffords, the massive shooting (and bombing) in Norway last year, or the Aurora movie theater shooting earlier this year in the premiere for the new Batman movie. That one happened near Littleton, Colorado, the site of the Columbine school shootings. Why aren't these as shocking to us? Why doesn't life seem to stop after such incidents? Have we grown immune to such incidents, shrugging our shoulders and resigning these tragedies on an epic scale to be among the inevitable realities of modern day life? If so, what does that say about us?
Now, there are a lot of questions regarding mass shootings. We often hear from survivors, or surviving family members of victims, who struggle to try and make some sense of it all. Of course, what we hear is how painful it is, and the struggles, physically and emotionally, to try and move on. For the rest of us on the outside, it all seems surreal, hard to imagine.
But can you imagine being the parent of one of the kids who did the killing on that day? What can you be thinking? What was your reaction on that day?
I vaguely remember that Dylan Klebold's father had placed a call to 911 and told the operator that he believed his son was involved. But that was it, for the most part. Plenty of people blamed them, and the parents of Eric Harris. But nobody seemed to actually here from them.
Until now.
In a truly amazing article by Jessica Ferri of Parenting Magazine, we get to hear directly from the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teenage murderers responsible for Columbine.
Normally, I would include quotes and such, and talk about my own reaction to reading such an article. But, I think it would be better for you, the reader, to just read this article yourself. You get direct quotes from both parents, the mother and the father. It is unbelievable, and it's hard to imagine living your life after such a thing. The mixture of grief and, most likely, guilt, at being associated with these events.
This article is amazing, and it is because of a book by Andrew Solomon, titled "Far From The Tree", that explores unusual kids, and there is a chapter that discusses violent children who commit crimes.
Here is the link to the article, titled "Columbine Shooter Dylan Klebold's Parents Speak Out":
http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/columbine-shooter-dylan-klebold-8217-parents-speak-191300537.html
Here is a link to another article, this one on the Aurora shootings and inevitable comparisons to the shootings that occurred at nearby Columbine ("With Aurora Massacre, Memories of Columbine Stir" by Alon Harish of ABC News):
http://news.yahoo.com/aurora-massacre-memories-columbine-stir-194551556--abc-news-topstories.html
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