Columbine

Editorial

December 31, 1999, Friday

AMERICAN CULTURE

EXCAVATING COLUMBINE

LIFE was easier before Columbine, before Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold burst onto our national stage with their trench coats, pipe bombs and assault pistols. Before they killed a dozen of their Columbine High School classmates, one of their teachers and themselves. Before police released the five videos the two killers made in the weeks before the shootings, videos that say as much about our twisted culture as they do about these twisted killers.

Make no mistake, these two young men were sick. Hatred, rage and narcissism consumed them. Their logic was contorted, their tie to reality tenuous. Before the murders, Harris sends his apologies "to everyone I love" and Klebold assures viewers, "we're going to a better place."

It's easy to see the vast gulf that lies between ourselves - indeed, even most troubled teen-agers – and these gunmen. But the culture that created Columbine will never change if we ignore the chilling message of these videos: These kids were products of our culture. They consumed the worst of the messages we sent, then took those messages to their extreme, but hardly unpredictable, conclusion.

In the videos, the killers continually refer to the celebrity culture that inspired them. They modeled their rampage on the video game "Doom." They want Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino to tell their story, in a movie that mirrors their favorites – "Natural Born Killers" or "Reservoir Dogs." "Directors will be fighting over this story," Klebold says. Adds Harris: "Isn't it fun to get the respect that we're going to deserve?"

Such warped delusions of grandeur may have sprung from deep psychological, emotional, spiritual wounds or even adolescent grandiosity. But those delusions were hatched, perhaps even nurtured, in a culture that confers fame without regard to merit, that seems unwilling to distinguish notoriety from heroism. Monica Lewinsky is famous. So is Charles Manson. It scarcely matters what you do, so long as you do it in the spotlight. It apparently never occurred to these two teen-agers that they could earnfame for doing something right. Their primary motivation, the Columbine tapes suggest, was to do what so many celebrities do: Attract attention, then fame (however fleeting) for doing something wrong. It's not a wise or virtuous decision, but to a 17-year-old whose malleable mind has been steeped in violence, self-gratification and the supremacy of stardom, it's not illogical.

Kids are like sponges. They soak up everything around them. Maybe Hollywood never forced this pair to watch its murderous movies or play its gory video games. Maybe stronger families could have insulated them, or kinder classmates could have calmed them. No one forced them to inhale the fumes of our toxic culture.

But the culture we have consciously created - the movies, music and video games we complain about but continue to buy - made it too easy for Harris and Klebold to make wrong turns and absorb nihilistic values. That culture makes it too hard for the rest of our kids - even the straight-A students and the clean-cut jocks - to do the right thing.

We tell kids to just say no, then we pummel them with movies, music and role models who tell them over and over why they must say yes. We say we want them to enjoy learning for its own sake, to love their neighbors as themselves, to know they are worth more than the size of their wallets. Then kids see adults subscribe to the very values we say we abhor, celebrate the recklessness we say we despise. Many kids answer our hypocrisy not with mass shootings, but with drugs, eating disorders, promiscuity or streetfights. Must we wait for more kids to explode with rage or collapse in confusion before we decide we are on the wrong path?