Eric, Dylan and Mary of Doom

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are cover boys again -- this time in Time Magazine, which discloses the contents of some home videos they made before the massacre, and which again graphically links the killings to gaming. This meme rocketed all over the Net, and as e-mail from the Hellmouth suggests, it touched some brutally raw nerves.

I didn't lose any family members, and nobody close to me died or was injured in the Columbine Massacre, but I have to disclose something: this has become a very personal story for me, more than a media, technology or cultural issue.

I will probably never know why many of my Slashdot columns showed up on the Trenchcoat Mafia website that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold created, but they did. Then , after a series of Columbine-inspired "Hellmouth" columns about life in high school for the alienated, different, geeky and nerdy kids of the world - life changed for me.

I became peripherally involved in three kids' efforts to kill themselves. My e-mail frequently becomes a nearly unbearable torrent of misery - it shot up again after Time published its "exclusive" story this week -- as Columbine has given incompetent administrators and clueless journalists a license to humiliate and suspend, to segregate, libel and persecute the different and the alienated (See a few of today's e-mail offerings below).

Thanks to Rob and Jeff and Slashdot for publishing the "Hellmouth" series and keeping it up on the site. They have given a lot of these kids a place to go, and they express their thanks and appreciation almost every day.

Most of the country now believes kids are becoming more violent, when they're not. Parents believe schools have become more dangerous, when they're dramatically safer. Federal agencies like the FBI and ATF distribute "geek profiles" and profit-making corporations peddle software security programs to maintain secret lists of "potentially dangerous" students who also happen in some cases to be outspoken, individualistic and individualistic.

The war against these kids has become a crusade for conformity, intimidation and exclusion.

There hasn't been a day in the past eight months that I haven't gotten e-mail about life in the Hellmouth, post-Columbine. It comes from parents, teachers, mostly from geek kids. One that arrived yesterday from "Bear" quoted an online news story from Utah (I confirmed this story by checking a wire service):

To: jonkatz

"Jon. This week, a sixth-grader drafted a list of 12 "people to kill" after enduring months of taunting from classmates and has been kicked out of school.

The boy was indefinitely suspended last week pending a final decision by district administrators, said Kirk Denison, principal of Terra Linda Elementary School south of Salt Lake City. Denison said that the boy admitted he was "angry and frustrated" but denied he intended to kill the students, who had bullied him and thown dog feces in his face.

Surprisingly, the article did not mention plans to honor his tormentors for enabling administrators to identify and remove this dangerous kid from classes. Why, a student armed with a "list" could do untold damage! ?

[Jon], I simply can't get past the fact that this assault lasted for *months* and the administrators were obviously unwilling to act. Suspend the student - and prosecute everyone from the principal through district administrator for gross negligence, misfeasance, dereliction of duty, and conspiracy for assault and attempted murder after the fact. - Bear."

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Hundreds of kids have relayed similar stories: They're suspended, sent home, pushed into alternative schools for getting angry, saying or writing hostile things, expressing themselves openly and honestly.

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This week Time Magazine has re-opened some of these wounds with a cover story: "Exclusive: The Columbine Tapes: The killers tell why they did it."

The story includes details from a series of home videos Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris made before they died. A quote from one of them rocketed through the news media and the geek and gaming worlds within minutes of publication:

"Tick, tick, tick, tick?." says Eric Harris, shown holding a gun: "Haa! That fucking shotgun is straight out of Doom.?" The notion that computer games or the Net, or in the larger context popular culture, was the real villain at Columbine was dramatically reinforced in newspapers and on TV newscasts all over the country this week.

Time's cover story suggests that the real motivation for the Columbine shootings wasn't anger, a need for revenge against taunting or abuse, but a wish for celebrity. Time quotes the two kids arguments over which director could be trusted with their story, Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino.

Yet despite the fact that the magazine presented a more thorough look at the boy's lives than has yet been presented by the media, nothing the boys said or did in their videos, and nothing in the Time story, comes close to explaining why these kids took guns and bombs to their school and slaughtered their classmates. The original, almost painfully obvious, likely conclusion remains: the boys were severely disturbed.

To me, the section that stood out in the long piece - because it was such a familiar refrain from the many thousands of e-mails I've gotten -- were quotes from Klebold and Harris. Harris talked about how people made fun of him, of "my face, my hair, my shirts." Klebold taunted his extended family: "You made me what I am. You added to the rage" and told fellow students: "I'm going to kill you all. You've been giving us shit for years."

This is a point that educators, journalists and politicians have almost criminally refused to consider: Perhaps the best way to keep kids from turning on their classmates is to protect them in the first place, to create humane, create educational environments in which it is as unacceptable to push dog feces into somebody's face as it is to threaten to blow up your school.

If administrators think their post-Columbine crusades - or the software and profiling programs they are deploying to spot "dangerous" kids -- are making schools safer, they are tragically mistaken. They're simply fueling the anger and suffering, or driving it underground.

Perhaps the saddest and most infuriating thing about this war on the young is that it's predicated on a false-hood: schools aren't getting more dangerous but safer, teenagers aren't becoming more violent but less, crime among the young isn't rising but plummeting [see below]:

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A few e-mails, edited for length, from this week in the Hellmouth:

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From: Jamie Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:59:20 EST To: [e-mail] Subject: thank you

I myself am in a weird situation. The jocks and preppies will like me for a short time but there are times where they do nothing but abuse me in different ways' There are people who want me to be popular but I can't stand most of these people. They are all about being a part of a group and not themselves. I wear what they don't like and they look down on me.

All of this pressure has built up with me and lately I've been cracking. My dad is hard-core businessmen. He can't stand the fact that I'm idealist and fight the power in my own little, mostly white, small town, that I can...

I play guitar and use it as an outlet of anger but my parents took it, my passion, away. I've been crying and having violent outbreaks. I'm withdrawing form all of my classes cuz I can't stand them anymore. All of this goes back to pressure from peers and parents. I got in an interesting talk with my comp teacher when I wrote an anti-censorship paper.

She didn't understand my passion for music and musical freedom. If I was a better player I would start a band but I still suck. I told her this and she laughed about it under her breath. anyways thanx for an anger outlet and thanx for your support against music censorship. If you get the time e-mail me back and give me a response. thanx J

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To: jonkatz [e-mail] Subject: Can you help me?

"Jon, for the past six months I've been the target of the most vicious and most violent gang in the school - the football team. They've locked me in my locker, spray-painted my face, taken my laptop - yes, I am most definitely a proud geek, gamer and raver -- and gone through my personal stuff. I sort of lost it yesterday when one of them snapped a towel in the locker room that caught me in the eye and called me "geek-boy."

I said I was going to get a gun and kill him, just like Columbine. I don't have a gun, and have never seen one or touched one, but they reported me to the principal, and I was sent home. He said there was no choice, he had to protect the school from people like me. My mom says I might have to go to an alternative school for two years, as the principal says I'm possibly dangerous, and I can't be ignored. Is there anything I can do? My dad says I've ruined my life, that this will be in every government computer forever, and in my college file. I can't understand what's happened to me. 'Do words count so much more than actions? All my teachers know me, I'm not dangerous. But they won't talk to me now. And yes, I play Doom. That won't help either, I guess. How can you prove that you won't kill somebody? Dan, Maryland."

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To: jonkatz [e-mail]

"Predicted teen-age crime wave failed to occur, numbers show," -by David Westphal, Fresno Bee (12/13/99) [link]

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"WASHINGTON - In 1995, Americans were in a virtual panic over youth crime. Juvenile murder arrests were setting record after record. So were arrests for aggravated assault and robbery. Gun violence was growing progressively worse. And then came a startling prediction. As bad as juvenile crime had become, said a group of experts, it was about to get much, much worse.

"This is the lull before the crime storm," said criminologist James Alan Fox in an America Online forum. "The future may make 1995 look like the good old days."

Predictions like this one set off a rush of tough-on-crime initiatives that sent more juveniles to adult court, put more metal detectors in the nation's schools and resulted in dozens of new curfews across the country.

There's just one problem. This is a crime wave that never happened. Even as academics like Fox and John DiIulio were warning of a coming "super-predator" breed of young criminal, the juvenile crime rate was starting to head down. The violent crime arrest rate for juveniles fell another 11% last year, according to a new report, and now is down by 30% since 1994. The murder rate has been slashed nearly in half.

"The 'super-predator' never materialized," says Howard Snyder, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice. "A lot of people think crime among young people is still going up. But in fact it's dropped. A lot."

The story of how violent lawbreaking began to wane among the nation's youth is a remarkable one, because so many people were convinced crime was headed in the opposite direction - and for some good reasons.

Arrests for murder and other violent crimes had been in a steady, sharp rise since 1988. What's more, the ranks of the young were about to spike upward, as children of the baby boomers came into their teens. U.S. News and World Report, in a sobering cover story predicting a juvenile crime "time bomb," declared in 1996 that there was "scant hope that the pessimistic trends will stop anytime soon. The tragic fact is that it may take an ever greater bloodbath to force effective crime solutions to the top of the nation's agenda."

Instead, to the astonishment of many, juvenile arrests plummeted. Robberies are down by 45% since 1994; aggravated assaults are off by 20%; rape is down by 25%. In several big urban states the decline has been even greater.

In New York, for example, the arrest rate for violent crimes is off by more than 60% in just three years.

Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, says polls show that Americans overwhelmingly believe youth crime is still on the rise when in fact it's been falling sharply for four years. The result, he contends, has been an overreaction by the public and politicians to youth violence.

"You've got metal detectors showing up in schools where they don't even have a stoplight in town," he says. "Somehow Americans have been persuaded that our kids are animals out there with guns, headed to school."

Copyright ©1999, The Fresno Bee.

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From: Mike Terry Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 13:30:00 -0800 (PST) To: [e-mail] Subject: Geek Profiling leads to expulsion link:

"the Hallsville school system had a bomb threat just days after Columbine. Nevertheless, this is pretty close to being a worst-case scenario."

This link tells the story of David, a high school student who was expelled four days after the Columbine shooting and forced into an alternative school because he fit the profile of Harris and Klebold. It's impossible to judge all of the merits of any case like this from a distance. Judge it for yourself.