I’ve always been very curious about Eric’s interest in “all things German.” Why do you think he was? I know that he studied German and that he was an enthusiast of German industrial music; namely, KMFDM and Rammstein. His flirtation with Nazism is well documented, and he did a school report on Nietzsche. April 20, 1999 coincided with the release date of KMFDM’s album “Adios,” and the birthday of Adolf Hitler. Dylan doesn’t seem to have had the same feelings. (Didn’t Dylan study French instead?)

Dylan did study French, though he didn’t much like that class if accounts of his behaviour in that one are to be believed. I assume that he picked up on a fair bit of erroneous German through osmosis (read: Eric) and took to that one a bit more than he did French.

The thing about German is that it sounds harsh and even guttural to someone who doesn’t speak the language. English speakers don’t seem to be used to some of those sounds – I would imagine that even a faulty use of German like Eric’s would serve to alienate people thinking he was one hell of a weird kid. I think I see Eric using German as a defense mechanism, almost. It’s something that sets him apart from the crowd when he uses it, and he almost flees into it as something that helps him cloak himself in this threatening and dangerous Reb-persona. 

He flirted with the music not only for its sound, but also for the way the lyrics rolled into his own darkness and gave voice to it. He takes to the lyrics of the things he listens to and utilises them in his writing and self-expression. The German language in some instances serves to dimensionalise it: Rammstein, for all their shock value and harsh in-your-face tones, have a poetic quality in some of their lyrics that brings a depth of feeling to something that seems nothing but angry on the surface. Eric was much the same way: anger brewing underneath his skin, but deeper than that lies everything else he felt.

I think Eric took to the ideas of Nietzsche and Nazism and everything else partially because they have shock value (”Gott ist tot!”, anyone?) and partially because it was him testing the waters on what he himself believed. I think that eventually a lot of his early ideas would straighten out and form new dimensions onto themselves. You can see him move forward and attempt to structure all of those loose thoughts into a single idea throughout his writings. He discards as much as he takes on, flirts with new things that come his way, and incorporates what he can use to fortify his own idea that he is somehow godlike and worthy of respect. I think what drew him to this was simply that it was a voice he needed to fortify his own that had the added bonus of alienating a lot of people he didn’t really want to be close to anyway.

i wonder what would happen if Eric’s parents decided to move back to NY out of no where in like the beginning of 1999… would eric still do it?

Would Eric still go through with the massacre, you mean? Um, nope, I somehow have quite a hard time believing that he would. Imagine the Harrises packing up to go back to NY almost out of the blue. Knowing Eric’s way of dealing with emotions, he’d be shifting into denial for the first week or so after learning about it before finally bitching about it until kingdom come. He would hardly have the time to stash his guns, purchased before January of ‘99, and all his makeshift explosives in a place where the parents wouldn’t be likely to run across them. There would be no time to organise a hapless massacre/bombing and have all that meticulous planning go to waste on some half-assed idea that would probably fail even worse than the actual plan did. Imagine Eric wanting to organise it regardless and having his mom go “Eric I need you to take these boxes and put them in the car for me please” and having his dad go “son, I need you to come to Denver with me tomorrow to organise our journey”. He’d probably call Dyl in a fit of familiar rage going “it’s fucking over, V, you need to take all my stuff and do whatever with it because we’re moving back to fucking NY tomorrow” the minute the Harrises gave him a moment to breathe for himself. And then, then imagine the realisation hitting as soon as he gets his ass into that car that he is going back to a place that is – finally! – familiar ground with familiar people and familiar sights. Imagine the relief, tangible and almost radiant, upon the realisation that freakin’ godfearing Littleton is in the past forever. That he could get out, and live.

It’d be a new fighting chance, pure and simple. And I want to believe he would take it.

what do you think would happen if Dylan’s “love” had feelings for another girl and he found out about it? How do you think he would react? You know how he thought he had a boyfriend but what happened if it was another girl?

Mmhh, would it really make a difference? I think he’d still be sad about it, as you always are when you know your feelings aren’t going to be reciprocated, but he’d probably also arrive at the moment where he’d laugh to himself about it (you know, that smile with the crinkly eyes) going “dude you sure know how to pick them, guess there’s no chance in hell with that one”. In a way, I think it might even be less offensive to him for her to like a girl rather than for her to leave him in the dust for another guy who was everything Dylan felt he was not? It seems like he would not take it as personally then.

can you pleeease describe dylan’s perfect girl too like u did with eric? In great detail? I’m sorry to bother you with this but you explain it so well, thank u so much 💕✨

Hmm, I could perhaps try? Though, I have to say, I would like to defer to everlasting-contrast‘s wonderful post (and blog in general!) on the matter – I do not know how much I could really add to this one when it comes to content about the type of girl he might have liked and what a relationship might have been like for him. What I will do instead is offer up some loose thoughts about it under the cut as a tiny extra companion to E-C’s brilliance in the matter, if that is all right with you. =)

What always strikes me in Dylan is the divide I sense within him when it comes to human beings. On one hand, there is a cold and almost callous disdain born from the rift he sensed between himself and others. Human beings are sheep, living out their days in the bliss of an enclosement that they do not ever break free from. Dylan’s the sheep that kinda broke out of the confinement and is not only seeing the enclosement for what it is, but also sees the shepherd at a distance and the dogs meant to deter him in fear of further exploration. He finds himself frustrated with the other sheep – they do not understand why he is bleating about freedom and halcyon days, while he does not understand why they are bleating at him to re-join their fold and live out his days in confinement. He ends up looking down his nose at them on a number of occasions in a way he cannot seem to help. His opinion of them runs away with him the minute he is alone, and leaves him to consider dark options about a future within their midst.

On the other hand, he wants nothing more than to connect. Dylan, like anyone else, wants to belong somewhere. More importantly: wants to belong to someone. He creates an almost mythic archetype of The Girl within his mind: She seems to match him perfectly, as a mirror that complements him, and he is never alone when She is smiling at him from some universe in time. Dylan feels alone and separate from Her while he is on this planet – his longing to return to the halcyon, to a world that makes sense to him, seems to include his desire to see Her and be reunited with Her in the everlasting dance of life and death. He is not being realistic when he speaks of Her, and yet She seems far more real than any of the girls he met here.

Dylan reads as inherently lonely. He ostracised himself far more than he himself is ostracised: people professed to like him, to get along with him without issue, to be aware of his brilliant mind, to even be surprised at his involvement in NBK. They said he was the kinder of the two, but at the same time there was a fleeting awareness of a darkness within him. His loneliness, when it consumes him, turns to a quiet feeling of despair at not belonging.. and then comes the anger on its heels, squashed down because after all of this Dylan is still stupid enough (as he feels about himself) to want to be liked and he knows anger makes you likable to no one good.

He wanted someone good. He wanted someone who would walk with him and lean on him and say the incredible two words “I understand” even when he’d waffle all the words out wrong and trip over himself as an afterthought. Someone with a kind smile and hands that would heal all the cuts he’d given himself as the sheep that was too awake to belong in a cage. He craved the presence of someone who would not be deterred by dark like all the sheep around him, but would not revel within it either the way that Eric always did with a loud laugh and wild abandon. Dylan needed someone who would think long and hard about which bridges to build and which bridges to burn. He needed someone who’d say “hey, that looks like solid soil, want to build a house with me?” – the togetherness of being coaxed out of his shell and enjoying it because he could be himself without any limitations. She would build the house with him and then find him staring at her before he couldn’t help himself and said something stupid (like always, he would lament) like “I think that house is less of a home than you are home and heart to me”.

Dylan the romantic, it is said time and time again. Dylan the lover. Dylan the gentle soul, the kind heart, the man out of his time. Dylan the genius. Dylan the mediator, the unintentionally hilarious, the balancing act. This is what people see in him that he could never see within himself. What Dylan needed, from a girl, was the vision to see this in himself for the first time. He needed the backbone of patience to help him learn confidence within himself. If it ever fell away, it’d be disastrous. If it stayed, it would bring heaven to earth.

what does it mean not to condone what they did? english is not my primary language and i know it’s means something like forgive but it’s still not the same thing

Don’t worry, English isn’t my first language either. 😉 

To condone something is to view or treat something bad as acceptable, forgivable, and/or harmless. If I were to condone the massacre, I would see it as something that is an acceptable course of action for which Eric and Dylan are immediately forgiven.

As I don’t condone it, I see the massacre itself as harmful and unacceptable. I may understand the reasons why, sure, but I’d still kick both of them in the shins for the shit they did to other people (and to themselves, too). I do not believe that Eric and Dylan deserve to be forgiven for their actions, but I believe that it is necessary to forgive them all the same.

How would Eric and Dylan act as boyfriends?

Hm, this answer of mine will correspond a bit with the answer I gave to an ask a while ago – for completion’s sake, you’ll be able to find that one here. (And that one links to two other posts of mine, so there’s plenty of reading material in this particular context that I think you might like.)

Eric would be that boyfriend you’d need one hell of a strength in character for. One thing that’s always stands out to me about him is not only how much he wanted to feel needed, but how much he needed someone to be there for him. From the accounts we have from girls he dated, he seems to have treated them as sounding boards for his own troubles a fair bit. It feels to me like girls constituted ‘safety’ to him, in a sense – listening ears, caring arms to pull him into a hug, non-judgmental experiences, that kind of thing? And I have the feeling like he’d totally push for you to be there for him 24/7, available whenever he needed you. He got pretty snippy with Susan’s mother when he called and Susan wasn’t there, for instance, and you only have to look at the way he took a ‘break-up’ to realise that he may have had some deep-seated issues in the ‘abandonment and unavailability’-department.. I think you’d need to constantly and consistently go “dude stop don’t you dare call me for the 20th time today” followed by an inevitable “if you don’t get your ass off my front porch within the next five minutes I’m going to start throwing stuff at you”. (Who’d put up with that? Seriously, ladies, run for the hills when somebody does this with you. I mean it. First sign of this, get out while you can no matter how cute and sweet he is otherwise.)

But, you know, Eric was also a cut-up with his funny comments and said to be genuinely kind to people he liked. He’d try his hardest to reciprocate and make you feel like he was listening to you and being there for you. I don’t think he was tough to befriend at all, though he’d be tough to keep as a friend because of the way he consistently seemed to get a bee in his bonnet about everything under the sun. He may have been a little tougher to really get to know to the point where you’d successfully be able to avoid his pitfalls. I get the impression that he was really respectful of girls he liked and would never ever have treated them like shit if they were nice to him. Accounts from the girls he worked with and the girls he was friendly with in school describe him as a hugger, as someone who was always pleased to see you and had the time to talk with you, and as someone they could open up to about everything. I think he was raised to be mindful of women and keep them safe and everything, but that he didn’t always necessarily see them as being ‘on par’ with him in equality for that reason.

Dylan would’ve been quite different in that respect. I don’t think there was a question in his head about female equality – his family seems to have raised him in less of a traditional role setting than I’d say the Harrises seem to have. With Dylan, though, I think there was a danger of the opposite issue: he’d put a woman on a pedestal, only for himself to serve beneath her and cater to her. The way he always speaks of The Girl, his highest ideal he wanted to reunite with in the halcyon, reads to me as her being this perfect angel and him being so in love with her but also feeling like he is not quite worth the bliss she brings forth in him. Dylan denied himself a lot. He seems to have spent his time dancing around girls he liked rather than actively engaging in the dating game that is pretty customary for teenagers at that age. The way he writes to them in the privacy of never-sent letters starts off as something that reads like a secret admirer, only to dissolve into an exercise of self-loathing as Dylan thoroughly convinces himself that a girl that bright and that lovely could never want to be around him. Convinced that ‘she’ would hate him, convinced that he was not worthy of love – it would take aeons for him to step out there and shyly offer her anything beyond a smile and a stammered ‘hi’. And, once shut down, I don’t think he’d have the guts to try again.

In contrast, though, Dylan seems to have done quite all right when it came to girls that he was just friends with. Girls like Devon and Robyn didn’t inspire that same fear in him that the unattainable Girl did. Devon describes him as really shy when she first met him and that she had the sense that he didn’t really know how to interact with people at times. She went on to befriend him, and during that friendship she discovered that he had a goofball side that was full of a dark sense of humour. She knew there were girls he liked and that you could tell he liked, but there wasn’t a girlfriend in all that time that she recalls – and Dylan wasn’t comfortable speaking about that subject, either. Robyn, too, had a pretty close-knit friendship with Dylan and describes him in one of her statements as having “a warm heart”. She stated that he sometimes did things for her, like going to prom with her, that he wouldn’t otherwise have done – self-sacrificing to keep someone he was friends with happy. I have the sense that he would’ve been like this in romantic relationships as well once he trusted someone enough to open up to them and be himself with them. Giving, selfless to a fault. Firm, though, too, if you pushed him around too much the way Eric sometimes was prone to do – the “get in the car”-snap is one of the examples of Dylan not lying down and taking someone’s shit for a change. He’d need to grow in confidence before he was able to do that with a girl, though. When you want to know how he would be as a boyfriend, I think the best bet would be to look at his friendships and see how that dynamic of trust could translate into a caring and sweet boyfriend.

It was about time for another tiny overhaul of the blog, so my sidebar and about-page have been updated/rewritten entirely. Another update that will hopefully be exciting to folks in future is the addition of the so-called Evidence Project page, which will feature my ongoing personal reorganisation of all the official evidence made available to us about Columbine in a way that will hopefully make sense to a reader/researcher. (Unlike, well, the mess JeffCo dumped into our laps..)

Interview: Tim Krabbé

On this Dutch review site, a review of Wij Zijn Maar Wij Zijn Niet Geschift (We Are But We Are Not Psycho) is rounded off with a fragment from one of our regular talkshows that features its author Tim Krabbé speaking about his book and about Columbine in general. I’ve done my best to translate the main gist of what Krabbé says, though I would definitely recommend listening to the interview because you will hear him speak with infectious enthusiasm about his 5-year(!) research about the case. 

Krabbé originally started his research after the Virginia Tech massacre, because the news from that case kept mentioning Columbine and the boys. He remembered Columbine vaguely, but wanted to know the details.. and began to figure out that the reality of the case isn’t how it’s commonly portrayed in the media. The interviewer incredulously asks him “but why, why spend five years of your life on this?”.. and Krabbe responds with the following.

Because I found it fascinating, spellbinding, right from the start, and I discovered that it was possible to dive into that riddle of ‘why’ and after reading their journals and the 26000 pages of evidence I discovered that there’s a lot of bullshit being published about Columbine and that the reality of it is far more interesting than what I had always assumed.

But, well, Krabbé is Dutch. He’s a European author diving into a very American subject. What does he have to offer us?

There’s bullshit in the police report, too, and I found that I could ‘improve’ on it – the police timeline doesn’t compute with the witness statements they took down at all, it’s all pure and utter nonsense!

There have only been publications about Columbine that are riddled with mistakes. There wasn’t a reconstruction of what exactly happened and what happened in those six years that Eric and Dylan knew each other, so I created it. You can see them slowly grow further into that idea, slowly become these philosophical murderers.

Then, the interviewer says something like “we always come to the conclusion that these kids are ‘crazy’ – but that’s not the one you drew“. Krabbé’s response is actually quite philosophical, here:

Of course you’re quite ‘crazy’ if you’re going to do something like this.. but what is ‘crazy’ when nobody in your environment has come to the conclusion that you are? They had a really solid grip on reality and on the truth. They were completely normal boys. In the US, they have been getting stuck in this idea that these guys were complete psychopaths!

Krabbé goes on to describe both Eric and Dylan: 

Eric was full of brawn. He had what I call the ‘Catcher in the Rye’-syndrome: everything that adults say and do is completely ridiculous. The world of adults is not real. It’s false – and we need to resist against it. Eric had a terrible inferiority complex. He, full of brawn, began to shout that all the world must die. It’s a little difficult to do that on a teenager’s budget, so he confined himself to the school. He is always seen as the leader, as the malicious brain who pulled that poor tall dude into it.

Dylan was the colder one of the two. His interactions with Eric gave form to the brawn. Dylan had this dream, quite like the thing portrayed in the movie Natural Born Killers, to unite with an ultimate lover in a mass killing. They would die together and become happy in the afterlife. It was this idea that drove Dylan, and Eric was pulled along into it somehow. 

The interviewer asks him about the moral of the story and about what Krabbé feels his book ultimately has as a bottom line, which is the closing end of the interview. Krabbé has been adamant throughout the interview that there have been so many lies told about Columbine. He’s been telling everyone that the truth about Columbine is out on the table for all the world to see: the journals and witness accounts are out there, as well as the videos. Diving into it uncovers the truth. Diving into it uncovers the reality of Columbine. And here, too, in his closing words, he is forceful on that matter:

The moral of the story is that you need to try to speak about reality, need to attempt to tell the truth. When Columbine first hit, all these bullied kids everywhere were full of admiration toward the boys for getting their vengeance. My book may be able to contribute to the idea that any thought of justified vengeance is not accurate at all.

Interview: Tim Krabbé

4/20/99: A Narrative Reconstruction (by Tim Krabbé)

thedragonrampant:

So, a while ago I coined a question about this post on here that was met with overwhelmingly positive responses. Apparently, quite a few of you get pretty excited when I mention translating the narrative timeline of events from Tim Krabbé’s We Are But We Aren’t Psycho! Any flaws in translation are obviously entirely of my own making. I have incorporated some ‘footnotes’ into this as well based on the notes within the subsequent chapter of the book. In the case of dialogue, I have gone back to the official information/transcript available and used the exact phrasing as much as possible.

Here we are, then, 20+ pages later..

Read More

16 years ago today. Worth the read again.

♥ Rachel Scott

♥ Daniel Rohrbough

♥ Dave Sanders

♥ Kyle Velasquez

♥ Kelly Fleming

♥ Lauren Townsend

♥ Corey DePooter

♥ John Tomlin

♥ Steven Curnow

♥ Daniel Mauser

♥ Cassie Bernall

♥ Matthew Kechter

♥ Isaiah Shoels

♥ Dylan Klebold

♥ Eric Harris

Asking in English so other people can understand this question: did you ever think about translating the Dutch book “Wij zijn maar wij zijn niet geschift”? Because I finished reading it and thought it’d make a pretty good book for other markets if it were in English.

I did think about doing a full translation of the book, yeah. I’ve lamented the fact that it’s only published in Dutch a few times to myself and to others, especially because I consider it to be one of the finer books about the case that would be a nice addition to Brown’s and Kass’s works in particular. I have translated some smaller fragments from it, as well as the chapter that sucked me into the book straight off the bat, but it’s a hell of a lot of work to not only get the translation as accurate as possible but to also preserve the ‘voice’ in which Krabbé originally wrote it. Doing that one chapter alone was a bit of a nightmare in that respect, haha.

I have to admit that I was (and am, still) also worried about any copyright infringement that might come from doing a full translation. From what I have understood, though, Krabbé doesn’t mind the amateur translations and his publisher doesn’t have the ambition to let the book be translated professionally at this point in time. I currently don’t mind translating some loose pieces of it that sound interesting, but doing the entire book cover-to-cover would take me away from the time I can devote to some of my other writing and research projects concerning Columbine that are my priority right now. So, who knows, maybe in future?

rhinestone-e-y-e-s:

Reblog this if you post stuff about serial killers/mass murderers or columbine so I can follow you

I was wondering who you identified more with, Eric or Dylan?

Dylan more than Eric. =) An attempt of an explanation as to why is, well, under the cut. (Because I get wordy about this question and you hardly need my personal blatherings filling up your dash, haha.)

My parents were told I was ‘probably all-round gifted’ when I was 4 years old. Dylan was placed in the CHIPS-program for gifted learners while in elementary school. If you’ve seen that post float around on Tumblr recently that said Dylan was very bright and usually finished any required reading for class way before it was due, you’ve seen a small glimpse of what that giftedness often manifests as in the eyes of others. I tested out of range on virtually any test they use to measure your skill/intelligence with back when I was a kid and have the tendency to absorb knowledge like a sponge to the point where I can utilise it creatively and associatively to whatever end I see fit. Dylan was known to tinker around with computers and I have the sneaking suspicion that he taught himself more than school ever taught him on a number of subjects that interested him.

Being gifted is a double-edged sword: you learn faster and more comprehensively/creatively than most people, but you also have the tendency to get bored out of your skull to the point where you become disruptive in class and/or check out entirely. Dylan was both of the latter, blowing up in French class but checking out and not applying himself to the best of his ability in other classes, and I was both of the latter at around that age too. This kind of rapidfire intelligence can be intimidating and frustrating for teachers and other adults to deal with, especially when you become a disruptive little shit because you’re bored to tears. (I vividly remember my physics teacher’s sigh of despair when he called me out in class because I’d been talking/disrupting his monologue and asked me to repeat what he’d said, after which I just ended up repeating his entire speech word-for-work back at him and finished it off with “is that to your satisfaction, sir?”. Any attempt to corner me means meeting that intelligence on a playing ground you don’t want it being on, pretty much..) Dylan, like me, was likely at the point where school was ‘too slow’ for his brain and where dealing with peers often meant navigating a world so different from yours that finding common ground at all is a challenge.

Dylan lamented feeling different from others a lot. He seems to have wanted to connect to people a lot, but being unsure of how he could. There seems to have been that relentless fear that if he did show who he was in all his aspects, nobody would understand him. It’s a fear that I’ve shared over the years and still share when I need to get out there and meet new people. It’s not that I don’t want to connect, but it’s more that most of you guys tend to be pretty foreign to me in the way you think and lead your lives. Dylan seems to have experienced that kind of separation and ‘feeling different’ as well, though I am unsure if he worked through the first onset of disdain long enough to find an interest in humanity’s way of going about things. He had existential angst bigger than himself – the how/what/why of being here is a constant companion for me, too. Dylan always seems to have longed for a home away from home. I’ve often said that I’ve been homesick literally all my life.

Like Dylan, I was raised totally pacifist. I find more recognition in his home life than I do in Eric’s, because the Klebolds give off the impression to me that they are on equal footing with one another and attempted to engage their children in decisions and so on. My parents fill the traditional role model of a working father and a stay-at-home mother, but that in no way makes my mom fall in line with my dad the way I suspected the dynamic of the Harrises worked. I was raised to believe that I was allowed to question everything, including any and all authority, and that I had the right to get answers to everything I questioned. I would’ve probably driven the Harrises up the wall, while the Klebolds might’ve welcomed the challenge of raising a child whose every second word was “why?”. (Maybe, well, Dylan was like that too?) And while my parents had the final say over me, I was asked for my opinion a lot and had them listen to me no matter what I came up with. I was pretty much raised to believe that my voice matters, but that I must be kind in its expression as much as I possibly can.

Dylan was said to suppress his anger and hatred a lot. I am the same way, to the point where I even found it hard to relate to Eric at first because he is so much more expressive about anger and hatred than I ever was. People were genuinely surprised at Dylan’s involvement in the massacre in much the same way I suspect people in my life would’ve been surprised if I had done the same thing the boys did. I internalise my emotions and have the tendency to rationalise them when they become too big for me, which is what I suspect Dylan did a lot of the time as well. With friends, I tend to be the mediator just like you can see Dylan’s attempts to keep everybody happy. Dylan’s astrological chart (bear with the woo-woo, folks) is said to have a lot of planets in air signs, notably the balancing Libra, while I’m a pure airhead Aquarian with a tendency to get cerebral and even aloof about any number of things. I don’t think there were many people who truly knew Dylan due to his tendency to ‘wear different faces around different people’, while people often find it hard to get to know me because I have a pokerface that doesn’t budge easily. You get to know levels of me rather than the genuine me.

However, perhaps unlike Dylan.. I tend to get pushy and authoritative when I know my shit and want to get other people on board. I have the tendency to either ‘go big or go home’ in any of my revolutionary ideas: I don’t do half-assed plans or try to change something only a little. Step-by-step plans are laughable when I can see the big picture and know in my head that I can pull it off and make it work. I don’t compromise very easily, if at all, and when you tell me something’s black when I think it’s white we are never going to arrive at a place of agreement without a fight. I don’t budge when I know I’m right. I hate any and all assumptions that I have to listen to any word you say simply because you’re in a position of authority. Authority isn’t a right you just have, it’s a right you earn. And when I feel you haven’t earned it, good luck trying to lord anything over me. I shut down when you call me out, manipulate you into whatever you wanna hear at the time, and then lose my shit about it in private. Sound like someone else you know? Yeah, that’d be the side of me that finds more common ground in Eric. 😉 

I’m more nuanced than Eric, most days, which I’m guessing is a result of honing my mediation skills and of a pacifist upbringing. But my rage, when it finally hits, is just as relentless and uncompromising as Eric’s was. Remember that shout of “I hate the fucking world, too many goddamn fuckers in it” that’s pretty much the opening anthem of his journal? That’s pretty much a description of the non-pacifist side of me that flips the switch when annoyed and tends to go “humanity’s the fucking disease on this planet”. I’m very quick to blanket-cover all of humanity and tar them all with the same brush of “dumb fucks” once I’m so pissed off that I just feel my rage rise up inside of me with the force of a hurricane. I get black-and-white about it all at that point, the way you can see Eric get black-and-white about a number of loves and hates too. 

Also, some people have stated that Eric was a ‘cut up’ and really quite funny with a contagious laugh to boot. I’m much the same way when I’m comfortable around people, snarking away in funny voices and interspersing regular speech with an offhand hilarious remark without even thinking twice about it. His “oh never mind!” from that cafeteria video is exactly the way I can get when I’m on a roll – it’s no wonder that the first thing I clicked with Eric on was the complete shitfest that is a shared sense of humour. He had me rolling with laughter (the contagious kind where you just have to laugh along even though you think I’m a fucking idiot for laughing at it at all) at some of the stuff he came up with, and nodding along in full comprehension with some of those ragefests of his. He got obsessive about the things he did enjoy, too, which is something I recognise from myself as well. (And, well, let’s not forget that I have been known to randomly shout about sci-fi and outer space and all that jazz the way I think Eric got excited about all that shit too.)

I could really just go on forever detailing and nitpicking at parts of them that remind me of myself somehow, but I think I’m going to end up with the following.. I feel like Dylan was a lot like me the way I am internally, with a thirst for knowledge and a genuinely kind demeanour but also a sense of being separate from the world due to the different vantage point that giftedness provides. I think that Dylan’s tendency to internalise is exactly like my own and that we share common ground on a lot of things. I feel like the parts of me that do identify with Eric are like tiny lightning bolts instead, striking at random intervals and being far less consistently seen by others. I think those are the parts of me that come out once you really get to know me well enough to be trusted by me, while the parts of me that identify with Dylan are out there for all the world to see. I identify more with Dylan than with Eric because I know the side of me that identifies with Dylan far better than I know the tiny lightning flashes that find common ground with Eric, if that makes sense? I’m still exploring the latter while I’ve made my peace with the former. It’s likely that I’ll forever identify more with Dylan, though. =)

thecolumbineblogwithrebandvodka:

As I look over this picture, you can tell it was complete chaos on the day of the shooting.

“Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.” – Victor Hugo

happy birthday, sunshine [x]

mossberg42099 replied to your post “If you could go back in time and talk to only either Eric or Dylan in…”

I absolutely love the two different perspectives given here.

Thank you, that’s good to hear. =) Two different perspectives for two vastly different people, right? It wouldn’t make much sense to approach Dylan the way I would Eric, nor the other way around. The focal points that would work in a conversation with Eric wouldn’t hold a lot of water in a conversation with Dylan, nor would any points made around Dylan be appropriate points to bring up when facing Eric. It’s rather interesting to contemplate how one would approach them. Sometimes, I get the feeling that that’s the only way you could really hope to comprehend this case: imagine yourself sitting with one of them and let them do the talking. There are some surprising insights to glean from that.

If you could go back in time and talk to only either Eric or Dylan in attempt to prevent the attack, who would it be?

Very interesting question, thank you! Took me a while to ponder it after I caught sight of it early this morning, and while I hardly think that a talk with me would solve their issues to the point where it could prevent the massacre I would still love to have that time machine you speak of and give it my best shot and just hear them out. Let them talk and I would listen and comment and poke at everything that felt odd or deceitful.. I think most of us running blogs about them have thought about this at some point? (My preference would be to speak with both separately and together, of course, but that’s not what you asked. ;))

Had you asked me this back when I first started my research, I would have probably opted for Dylan. I still think that relating to him comes most easily to me when I think back on some of my own experiences I had when I was Dylan’s age. I recognise enough from the depression and feeling ‘out of place’ in the world to be able to reach out to someone like Dylan in understanding and support. Also, I think that (though he spoke of a killing spree long before the idea was actually born) his primary motivation for the massacre was still suicide. That was the highest goal – all else that happened for Dylan that day was ‘fun’ and a means to burn every bridge behind him so he wouldn’t be able to backtrack at the last second. The elation he felt at the time is not unfamiliar to me, and I think that he and I would be able to have quite a long and interesting conversation about the massacre and his motivations in heading into that. I do believe that it would take quite a while for Dylan to reach the point where he would even speak about anything that was going on. You can see in the diversion papers that he cites his main problems being from something that I consider to be as ‘superficial’ as a job. In other words: Dylan has no problems and doesn’t even cite some of the regular confusion many teenagers his age go through. Poking a hole in his balloon of “I am fine and there is nothing wrong with me” would take a bit, especially because you can’t just go on and do that when you haven’t built up an okay level of trust with somebody. He’d be a challenge, make no mistake about that..

However, you’re asking me this now.. and now I would absolutely opt for Eric. My motivation for that would be twofold: he was the primary organiser for the massacre and he was a puzzle even to himself. Note that I don’t mean that he was the instigator for the massacre, as I firmly believe responsibility for the plan itself lies with both of them, but rather that he was the one who had his shit together more and actually sought to organise the wild plan into a semblance of ‘A-B-C what do I need’. Taking Eric’s organisational skills out of the equation would leave Dylan adrift and floundering, especially given the heavy depression I believe Dylan suffered from at the time that would make it so much harder for him to organise things constructively for himself alone. So, that’s the immediate practical end of things covered. Second, of course, you’ve got Eric writing for an audience but lying through his teeth about everything important at the same time. I’d give him the audience he wanted in the attentive form of Mama Dragon and just let him talk about anything – but good luck to him trying to bullshit me on any of it, because I think I’ve gotten to the stage in my research where I can tell when he’s being truthful and when he’s being an utter little shit about it. I honestly find myself amused with him and exasperated with him at the same time. Unraveling Eric’s defense mechanisms would take a very long time and create a very confrontational and painful talk, but I would opt for nothing less in an attempt to prevent Columbine from becoming a household name. It would be interesting, to say the least.

no one ever: wow dave cullen sure does know what he’s talking about

What Harris and Klebold did was monstrous. But does it help to portray them as monsters? They were, let us not forget, only teenagers. Youth is supposedly a time of hope and idealism. How, then, was it possible that so much hate could be accumulated by these youth in so short a time? And not only hate, but utter despair as well. In their own minds, they had many reasons to kill, but none to live.

David North of World Socialist Web Site, “The Columbine High School Massacre: American Pastoral…American Berserk.“ (April 27th, 1999)