You know, I don't go usually of off emotional tangents like this, but I just watched an episode of
Boston Public tonight, and I am really, really getting sick of the
mass media making people like me, people like us, into the villains.
It's really fucking ironic, it seems, that those who are "victimized", who suffer or have suffered through harrasment, verbal abuse, belittling, we must now suffer the media's ostracization.
I guess I feel compelled to write in this, in part, because of the recent lawsuit by a vigilante group of vengeful Colorado soccer moms who want to begin purging everything that caused the Columbine "incident" -- except the actual cause of it.
Everyone, it seems, is chronically missing the point. As DMan so correctly stated, the reason Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up their high school was not because they were psychos. It was not because they played too many video games. It was not because they wanted attention. It was because they endured the same shit over and over, day in and day out. They were isloated. Excluded. Jeered at. Why? Because, way back in the days when they were little kids who didn't know better, someone decided they were weridos. Freaks. They didn't deserve the same respect as everyone else. They weren't really people. That little curse lived on with them as they became aware of the world around them. It lived on, until they day they took their own lives. No, ladies and gentlemen, it was not the video games. It was society around them. It chewed them up and spat them out, and then rubbed the heel of its shoe in the disfigured, wretched mound of their broken psyche.
And they fucking snapped.
And if you can't realize this was what really happened, then you are indeed looking at the issue through rose colored glasses. I don't want to see high schools get massacred. I grieve for what happened at Columbine. But I don't grieve the scum that got killed, because the whole thing was their own damn fault. I grieve for the tortured souls of Harris and Klebold, and I grieve for the fact that will never be vindicated, and will never be understood for what they really were.
I don't want to see the face of the "victims" on 60 minutes. I don't want to read sympathetic stories about them in Time magazine. They didn't deserve to die, perhaps, but it is folly to say that those who were the targets of our dear little perpetrators were as innocent as the driven snow.
But I digress. The media likes missing the point, really. They present the issue that most people want to hear. The masses, the parents of America, don't want to be told that their Johnny and Sally are driving those druggy goth freaks over the edge. Their kids would never do that. So the media dances around the truth. The schools are harsh about discipline.
And oh, how wrong they are. They are, in effect, plucking up the stem of the weed, but leaving the root to fester. In time the weed will return to despoil the garden once more, unless its root is removed as well. The decadent, merciless hierarchy that exists in public high schools is that root. Until we can come to see that as the true cause of the violent retaliation of these tortured souls, we cannot pull it from the ground, and we cannot solve this problem.
Don't go shoot up your schools, kids. It won't have the effect you want. But please, please don't make Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold out to be the evil incarnations of satan in whose veins runs not blood but black, thick oil. That isn't what they were. They don't deserve that, and neither does the video game industry, or any honest organization like that. You know who to blame, so spread the word.
Kit Lo: Yeah, sorry I neglected to mention who the bad guys and good guys were in that episode. I started writing the writeup about halfway through it, so I wasn't really sure. I would agree though, that anyone who blames it on videogames, or any other physical outside influence has it horribly wrong, as does anyone who villifies the perpetraitors and places no blame whatsoever on those who drove them to it.