I enter the hallway. He is there. I can sense him, hear him, feel him, smell him. Among all these people, he is there. But this time will be different. I have been so powerless against his evil ways. He has taken so much, won so many times, but not this time. He has taken everything from me: my pride, my dignity, my reputation. He has done his worst. But justice is about to be brought upon this most evil of all men. I walk with no expression on my face, but I stand a little taller. I am on a mission. Not one of these petty little people knows of my mission. It is secret, and I have a purpose. If they only knew. If they only knew of my power. I am one better than all of them, with their speedy little cars, and their parties and their beer. They are such simpletons. Things suddenly go in slow motion. I see him. He steps out from around his people, and he sees me. We lock eyes for only a moment, as he recognizes me. He turns and begins to slowly walk away from me toward the stairs. He pretends he doesn’t see me. I yell his name. He takes off. In one fluid motion, I drop to a knee while pulling out my revolver. He’s not getting away this time. As I yell at him, people closest to me begin to scream and hit the floor, others run. I have a clear shot at him. I fire twice, he hits the ground, and then …
I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop. It was just after class. Sitting with a couple of friends of mine. Cool guys. James is gay, though, and we were talking about how he was getting so much trouble for it. Right then, the big guy walked in. Walks around these parts like he owns the place. He’s got the car and the girl. Kathrine, the girl of my dreams. I am twice the man he is, but I keep it inside. I go about my day, being the good guy, not the type of jerk he is. Does she notice? Of course not. But someday she will. Little did I know how soon the chance would come. He ordered a drink and then saw us in the corner. I saw him say something to his man next to him. They both chuckled, and they looked over again. I got that knot in my stomach. Here they come. This time, we were finishing this. As they walked by, I heard him say, “Faggot.” I jumped up and asked, “What you say?” James told me to sit down, but this was it. “You heard what I said.” I was talking about your lover boy over there. “You got a problem with it?” I replied in the affirmative, and quickly added something to tick him off. His right was quick, but not as quick as my left was to block it. As I held his fist, I hit him in the gut with my strong arm. He coughed, and doubled over a bit. As I stepped back, he made a lunge, and I landed a knock right on his jaw. It sent him spinning backwards. He grabbed a glass from somewhere and threw it at me. I blocked it with my forearm, and it shattered on the floor. I seized a chair, and swung it at him, hitting him around the upper body. He collapsed on the floor and lay there. Blood was oozing from the side of his head. His friend had long since ran off, and I gave his passed-out body a poke with my foot, and signaled to my friends that our work here was done, and we should be on our way. After that …
Sounds like a movie or a television show, huh? Yeah, that’s my point. Fact is, those aren’t scripts. They are a glimpse into the mind of an average high schooler. Not a psycho, or a crazy person. Not a cop, or Walker Texas Ranger. A high schooler. The stories above are fiction. In the first situation, our good guy walks right down the hall. As he passes our bad guy, he takes his typical tauntings, name calling and shoves. He keeps his eyes down and sets his teeth, fighting back the anger. In the second story, our good guy sits embarrassed by the bad guy’s comment, until he is passed, at which time, he whispers, “Hey, don’t worry about that guy. He’s a jerk.”
The point is not that these scenes happened, but they do flash through the minds of normal kids, in high schools across America. They are the short kids, the fat kids, the kids that dress badly, the kids that aren’t jocks, the kids that don’t get the girl. It doesn’t matter what it is that makes them different, but it makes them angry.
A scary thought hit me as I watched the most horrendous event I have ever witnessed-the Columbine massacre. As I sat in my Denver apartment, I thought about what these kids did to rationalize such horrible actions. Then it hit me. I recognized the scene. Gunshots in a high school hallway, or library, or cafeteria. If you were ever angry in high school, think back. Ever have thoughts of violence? Ever thought about getting back? I found that I had. I never in a million years have entertained such thoughts. The reflex of my mind always kicked in and brought forth all the evidence that sanity produces: such actions are immoral and ineffectual. And in the blink of a mind’s eye, the whole thought process had passed.
As I sat, sickened by the scene’s on my TV screen, I asked myself, where did these thoughts come from? I made a quick connection. Where do we see conflicts between good and evil, David and Goliath? On the silver screen, on the tube. Good guys shooting the bad guy, who by the way, is always evil. The guy never had a good day in his life. He is pure evil, so hey, he dies, we don’t care. In both scenes our high schooler sees evil, and there is a very thin line between the scenes that flash through his mind, and a recognition that these people are not evil enough to pull a Bruce Willis on.
After listening to the testimony of the apartheid rulers that had persecuted people for decades, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu replied, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” He was filled with a sense that there was little that divided him from those men. As I sat contemplating the deaths of the 13 children, I had the same revelation. It is only through a different understanding of conflict resolution, or maybe it was that I was never treated like Klebold and Harris were. These boys were beaten by the football team, emotionally abused by their peers, tortured daily. They had reached a point where they needed options. The scary thing is where they got their opportunity to kill.
We know that never before had either of them seen a family member, or a real life good guy, resort to violence to settle a problem. But thousands of times, they saw the movie and TV heroes shoot with immunity and be rewarded for it. Those scenes fill us with pride and power. We emulate their characters. For a time, we become them and enjoy it. The appeal of their manliness or the smoothness in their violence or their confidence and satisfaction fills us with envy.
To me that is scary. The next person I see who says that movies don’t affect our development, I will tell how my mind flashed scenes of the most dramatic of blockbusters, as I sat holding back tears of humiliation and anger. I don’t want to say that movies caused Columbine. The evil decisions of those boys caused that pain and suffering. But it scared me to think about how such scenes had affected me, though I believe that I am a pacifist-a peaceful person. It scared me to think of how such scenes might affect people who haven’t had the stable upbringing that I have had, or who are more angry than I am. For me, that changed how I watched movies for the rest of my life.
