Throwing stones

I am an accomplice to the two young men who pulled the triggers that killed 15 people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

That is not to say Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are not inexcusably responsible for what they did. They are, as are the six other teenagers and one 11-year-old who murdered 17 people in separate school-related shootings over the previous 20 months. In the aftermath of each increasingly deadly rampage, we ask why. What could poison such young people with all-consuming hatred? What could drive them to slaughter their teachers, classmates and parents?

Each time, they try to tell us. Each time, they are ignored.

We are too caught up in campaigns of blaming and bleating about times gone by to hear what they have to say. True, people like Harris and Klebold should never have been able to get their hands on guns, but the same can be said for certain friends of John Gotti and a New York police officer or two. Besides, gun control will not prevent kids from buying lighter fluid and nails.

True, killing is the object of most video games. This unquestionably renders children indifferent to gun violence, but blaming video games for school shootings does little to explain why more than 99 percent of the kids who play them do not massacre their peers.

True, movies and television seethe with gratuitous violence. Kids certainly don't learn diplomacy and compromise from The Terminator and Die Hard, but Combat, Gunsmoke and Battle of the Bulge weren't exactly about making nice.

More than one of the school killers apparently identified with characters in Natural Born Killers and Basketball Diaries, not necessarily because those characters turned violent, but because they were disillusioned loners and frustrated outcasts who wanted only one thing.

Attention.

It's arguable that those two movies give people like Harris and Klebold twisted ideas about getting the attention they desperately want, but what other examples do we hold up for people who don't fit in?

We idolize people based on what they look like, how high they can jump, who they can knock over and how much money they have. The rest of us are left to attach ourselves to others with those attributes or disappear forever among the great unseen. Confronting one's own anonymity can devastate a young mind filled with big dreams.

We all define ourselves through exclusion. We do not live next door to people of another race. We do not welcome gay people into our churches. We deny citizenship to the people who pick our grapes and diaper our babies. The greater the intimacy, the more intense the exclusion. Some people will ache with loneliness before dating someone overweight. We exclude others because we're deathly afraid of being excluded ourselves. We all share the universal desire to be accepted, but few of us extend the acceptance we crave.

So it is that I am an accomplice to the likes of Harris and Klebold every time I do not challenge the prevailing standard of what is beautiful, admirable and acceptable in another human being. When I do not meet a homeless person's eyes, when I cross the street rather than pass a black man on the sidewalk, when I do not welcome the disfavored into my company, I propagate estrangement in this world. And because nothing we do ever stops with us, one rejection ripples through the fabric of humanity like a stone tossed into still water, and only God knows how many of us tossed a stone that ended up in the hearts of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Monday, May 3, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.