Dylan Klebold, who, with his friend Eric Harris, carried out the school massacre in Colorado on April 20th, was an alienated member of his school community – as was his mother before him. Alexandra Coe, a minister in the United Church of Christ, reflects on the alienation and cruelty of their school, one generation earlier.
KNEW Dylan Klebold's mother. Susan was her name. We were schoolmates in a midwestern city at a school where the Reds and the Golds vied eternally for something. What it was I never understood.
The school's motto was forte et gratum. I have forgotten much of the Latin learned there, but I think it means 'strength and gratitude'.There was something about Susan and me that didn't quite make it; whether it was the fact that the sleeves of our uniforms were not rolled up just right, or that our socks were not fashionably faded, or the white of our saddle shoes not white enough. Were we too smart, or not smart enough? All we really knew is that we were not allowed to read the Book (circulated among the lucky ones, inscribed with their considered opinions on everyone in the class). All we really knew was that we would be left among the last two or three, when the hockey captains picked their teams, in a brutal custom sanctioned, for some reason, by the school. The depth and height of the cruelty allowed to blossom at our school is hard to imagine, or should be: a competitive viciousness learned at home from parents who were in the business of earning more, amassing more, of being more than others. The cruelty and pain creeps along the school halls, unnoticed by the ones whose business it is to teach and to care. 'Our song we sing with spirits gay,' began another school song. I am a woman now; the pain is not forgotten.
No, it echoes in the words of the song Courtney Love wrote: 'Someday you will ache like I ache'. It is both prophecy and threat. Someday you will ache like I ache. Such is the pathetic dream of the lost ones, who can only find power and meaning in their own death, and in the pain of others. And we cry out, cry out sickened by our own now too-familiar agony. We cry out for something, someone to blame – guns and Marilyn Manson, Hitler and video games – and never recognize the thing that creeps and hides along school walls, from generation to generation, inside of you and inside of me. I knew Dylan's mother. Will you demonize me, as you do her, because I knew her? But I see you, too, in this web; it holds us all, connects us. How much more blood will be spilled? Was there not enough blood shed on the cross for us to learn the lesson, the lesson of love? Top of Page | Archive | Ship of Fools Central © Ship of Fools 1999 |
HE TRUTH is this: pain transmits itself like a virus, quietly, unnoticed, down years of memory. Self-despising agony and inchoate rage creep in through the rear doors of the schools of the next generation, from generation to generation, until the gospel by which we live, the gospel that feeds an empty and lost life, is not 'love thy neighbor as thyself', for the self cannot be loved.