…if you have never thought about shooting up your school, you have never been a teenager, and anyone who says they don’t know what would drive a kid to doing it is either incredibly dense or a horrible liar.
Eric had issues with anger and resented the world at large for creating and then rejecting him.
If you go on the Columbine tag, you will be greeted by a bunch of teenage girls idolizing and talking about how hot these killers are. I’m disgusted.
Yeah, because everybody in this tag is a teenage girl with exploding ovaries..
.. think again. *rolls eyes*
I’ve always had this question in the back of my head.
Considering another 3 or 4 people killed themselves after Columbine (a few students and a parent) would you say there’s like 19 victims? (I always count Eric & Dylan obviously..)
I know these people weren’t directly effected (as in being shot and dying..) but would they still be victims?
Victims by extension, perhaps. They were not in the first line of victims (as in, actually fatally shot by Eric and Dylan) but that doesn’t mean their deaths were completely unrelated to what happened on 4/20/99. Some people who were inside that school and lived on that day can still be seen as victims, in my opinion, because of the trauma that they went through. Everyone handles grief and trauma differently, which is particularly difficult for someone whose mind/emotions were already in an unstable/unsafe place before the event.. It would stand to reason that the people who killed themselves after Columbine were (indirectly) affected by the trauma dealt to their community on 4/20/99, thus making them victims by extension.
“The murderer is a monster in the same way as a product of the society in which he lives. And to grasp the complexity of the species, is required to accept that the murderer is as human as any of his victims.”
Dylan Klebold love letter
This letter never fails to make my eye twitch. It reads more as stream of consciousness than it does an actual letter, in which he actually starts out reasonably okay but just turns disconcerting when he begins to undermine himself and begins to mention “going away soon”. This letter, too, is filled with the same points his journal includes (fate, dreams, new existence, ‘this Earth’ as though it’s not ‘his Earth’) and it seems to me like he is literally transcribing his thoughts without attempting to see his writing from another person’s view. (You know how most of us, when we write a letter, try to write it in a way that the recipient will understand and be able to reply to coherently? I don’t think Dylan placed himself in the recipient’s stead at all.) I think that he shows some self-awareness on one level while describing how he feels he appears to others, but then disrupts that same self-awareness again with filling in the blanks for the recipient of this letter with the whole ‘you would hate me if you knew who I was’ and the ‘you probably think I’m crazy’. It’s a level of conflict in one and the same piece of writing that I believe shows how fragmentarised, ‘elevated’ and insecure his thought processes were overall.
With ‘elevated’, I mean the part of him that never fails to turn metaphysical somewhere down the line. It reads as partial disdain for the human race and as partial self-inflicted solitude that may very well be the result of his documented ‘giftedness’. (It is quite common for a gifted child/young adult to have that dichotomy in their mind where their relation to the outside world is concerned: the godlike pedestal and the omega of the pack are both equally and often simultaneously present as states of being.)
Seeing the columbine `99 yearbook makes me so frustrated. If one tiny thing leading up to the massacre had gone differently, Lauren Townsend could be pulling her old, dusty senior yearbook off of a bookshelf right now. Eric and Dylan would stand out only to those that knew them, hardly ripples in a sea of hopeful faces.
Columbine 