Voices From The Hellmouth |
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Posted by JonKatz on Monday April 26, @12:26PM EDT
from the Geek-Profiling dept.
In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the country went on a panicked
hunt the oddballs in High School, a profoundly ignorant and unthinking response
to a tragedy that left geeks, nerds, non-conformists and the alienated in an even
worse situation than before. Stories all over the country embarked on witchunts
that amounted to little more than Geek Profiling. All weekend, after Friday's
column here, these voiceless kids -- invisible in media and on TV talk shows and
powerless in their own schools --
have been e-mailing me with stories of what has happened to them in the past few
days. Here are some of those stories in their own words, with gratitude and admiration
for their courage in sending them. The big story out of Littleton isn't about
violence on the Internet, or whether or not video games are turning out kids into
killers. It's about the fact that for some of the best, brightest and most interesting
kids, high school is a nightmare of exclusion, cruelty, warped values and anger.
The big story never seemed to quite make it to the front pages or the
TV talk shows. It wasn't whether the Net is a place for hate-mongers
and bomb-makers, or whether video games are turning your kids into
killers. It was the spotlight the Littleton, Colorado killings has put on the
fact that for so many individualistic, intelligent, and vulnerable kids, high
school is a Hellmouth of exclusion, cruelty, loneliness, inverted values
and rage.
From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Todd Solondz's "Welcome To The
Dollhouse," and a string of comically-bitter teen movies from Hollywood,
pop culture has been trying to get this message out for years. For many kids -
often the best and brightest -- school is a nightmare.
People who are different are reviled as geeks, nerds, dorks. The lucky ones are
excluded, the unfortunates are harassed, humiliated, sometimes assaulted literally
as well as socially. Odd values - unthinking school spirit, proms, jocks - are
exalted, while the best values - free thinking, non-conformity, curiousity - are
ridiculed. Maybe the one positive legacy the Trenchcoat Mafia left was to ensure
that this message got heard, by a society that seems desperate not to hear it.
Minutes after the "Kids That Kill" column was posted on Slashdot Friday,
and all through the weekend, I got a steady stream of e-mail from middle and high
school kids all over the country -- especially from self-described oddballs. They
were in trouble, or saw themselves that way to one degree or another in the hysteria
sweeping the country after the shootings in Colorado.
Many of these kids saw themselves as targets of a new hunt for oddballs -- suspects
in a bizarre, systematic search for the strange and the alienated. Suddenly, in
this tyranny of the normal, to be different wasn't just to feel unhappy, it was
to be dangerous.
Schools all over the country openly embraced Geek Profiling. One group calling
itself the National School Safety Center issued a checklist of "dangerous
signs" to watch for in kids: it included mood swings, a fondness for violent
TV or video games, cursing, depression, anti-social behavior and attitudes. (I
don't know about you, but I bat a thousand).
The panic was fueled by a ceaseless bombardment of powerful, televised images
of mourning and grief in Colorado, images that stir the emotions and demand some
sort of response, even when it isn't clear what the problem is.
The reliably blockheaded media response didn't help either. "Sixty Minutes"
devoted a whole hour to a broadcast on screen violence and its impact on the young,
heavily promoted by this tease: "Are video games turning your kids into killers?"
The already embattled loners were besieged.
"This is not a rational world. Can anybody help?" asked Jamie, head
of an intense Dungeons and Dragons club in Minnesota, whose private school guidance
counselor gave him a choice: give up the game or face counseling, possibly suspension.
Suzanne Angelica (her online handle) was told to go home and leave her black,
ankle-length raincoat there.
On the Web, kids did flock to talk to each other. On Star Wars and X-Files mailing
lists and websites and on AOL chat rooms and ICQ message boards, teenagers traded
countless countless stories of being harassed, beaten, ostracized and ridiculed
by teachers, students and administrators for dressing and thinking differently
from the mainstream. Many said they had some understanding of why the killers
in Littleton went over the edge.
"We want to be different," wrote one of the Colorado killers in a diary
found by the police. "We want to be strange and we don't want jocks or other
people putting us down." The sentiment, if not the response to it, was echoed
by kids all over the country. The Littleton killings have made their lives much
worse.
"It was horrible, definitely," e-mailed Bandy from New York City. "I'm
a Quake freak, I play it day and night. I'm really into it. I play Doom a lot
too, though not so much anymore. I'm up till 3 a.m. every night. I really love
it. But after Colorado, things got horrible. People were actually talking to me
like I could come in and kill them. It wasn't like they were really afraid of
me - they just seemed to think it was okay to hate me even more? People asked
me if I had guns at home. This is a whole new level of exclusion, another excuse
for the preppies of the universe to put down and isolate people like me."
It wasn't just the popular who were suspicious of the odd and the alienated, though.
The e-mailed stories ranged from suspensions and expulsions for "anti-social
behavior" to censorship of student publications to school and parental restrictions
on computing, Web browsing, and especially gaming. There were unconfirmed reports
that the sale of blocking software had skyrocketed. Everywhere, school administrators
pandered and panicked, rushing to show they were highly sensitive to parents fears,
even if they were oblivious to the needs and problems of many of their students.
In a New Jersey private school, a girl was expelled for showing classmates a pocket-knife.
School administrators sent a letter home: "In light of the recent tragedy
in Littleton, Colorado, we all share a heightened sensitivity to potential threats
to our children. I urge you to take this time to discuss with your children the
importance of turning to adults when they have concerns about the behavior of
others."
This solution was straight out of "1984." In fact, this was one of the
things it's protagonist Winston was jailed for: refusing to report his friends
for behavior that Big Brother deemed abnormal and disturbing.
Few of the weeks? media reports - in fact, none that I saw - pointed out that
the FBI Uniform Crime reports, issued bi-annually, along with the Justice Departments
reports (statistical abstracts on violence are available on the Department's website
and in printed form) academic studies and some news reports have reporters for
years now. Violence among the young is dropping across the country, even as computing,
gaming, cable TV and other media use rises.
Unhappy, alienated, isolated kids are legion in schools, voiceless in media, education
and politics. But theirs are the most important voices of all in understanding
what happened and perhaps even how to keep it from happening again.
I referred some of my e-mailers to peacefire.org, a children's rights website,
for help in dealing with blocking and filtering software. I sent
others to freedomforum.org (the website Free!) for help with censorship and free
speech issues, and to geek websites, especially some on ICQ.com where kids can
talk freely.
I've chosen some e-mailers to partially reprint here. Although almost all of these
correspondents were willing to be publicly identified - some demanded it - I'm
only using their online names, since some of their stories would put them in peril
from parents, peers or school administrators.
From Jay in the Southeast:
"I stood up in a social studies class -the teacher wanted a discussion --
and said I could never kill anyone or condone anyone who did kill anyone. But
that I could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because
day after day, slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can learn how
to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over sometimes, especially when you
come to see that you're hated only because you're smart and different, or sometimes
even because you are online a lot, which is still so uncool to many kids?
After the class, I was called to the principal's office and told that I had to
agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or be expelled from school, as I
had expressed ?sympathy? with the killers in Colorado, and the school had to be
able to explain itself if I ?acted out?. In other words, for speaking freely,
and to cover their ass, I was not only branded a weird geek, but a potential killer.
That will sure help deal with violence in America."
From Jason in Pennsylvania: "The hate just eats you up, like the molten metal
moving up Keanu Reeve's arm in the ?The Matrix.? That's what I thought of when
I saw it. You lose track of what is real and what isn't. The worst people
are the happiest and do the best, the best and smartest people are the most miserable
and picked upon. The cruelty is unimaginable. If Dan Rather wants to know why
those guys killed those people in Littleton, Colorado, tell him for me that the
kids who run the school probably drove them crazy, bit by bit?.That doesn't mean
all those kids deserved to die. But a lot of kids in America know why it happened,
even if the people running schools don't."
From Andrew in Alaska: "To be honest, I sympathized much more with the shooters
than the shootees. I am them. They are me. This is not to say I will end the lives
of my classmates in a hail of bullets, but that their former situation bears a
striking resemblance to my own. For the most part, the media are clueless. They're
never experienced social rejection, or chosen non-conformity'Also, I would like
to postulate that the kind of measures taken by school administration have a direct
effect on school violence. School is generally an oppressive place; the parallels
to fascist society are tantalizing. Following a school shooting, a week or two-week
crackdown ensues, where students? constitutional rights are violated with impunity,
at a greater rate than previous."
From Anika78 in suburban Chicago:
"I was stopped at the door of my high school because I was wearing a trenchcoat.
I don't game, but I'm a geekchick, and I'm on the Web a lot. (I love geek guys,
and there aren't many of us.) I was given a choice - go home and ditch the coat,
or go to the principal. I refused to go home. I have never been a member of any
group or trenchcoat mob or any hate thing, online or any other, so why should
they tell me what coat to wear?
Two security guards took me into an office, called the school nurse, who was a
female, and they ordered me to take my coat off. The nurse asked me to undress
(privately) while the guards outside the door went through every inch of my coat.
I wouldn't undress, and she didn't make me (I think she felt creepy about the
whole thing).
Then I was called into the principal's office and he asked me if I was a member
of any hate group, or any online group, or if I had ever played Doom or Quake.
He mentioned some other games, but I don't remember them. I'm not a gamer, though
my boyfriends have been. I lost it then. I thought I was going to be brave and
defiant, but I just fell apart. I cried and cried. I think I hated that worse
than anything."
FromZBird in New Jersey:
"Yeah, I've had some fantasies about taking out some of these jerks who run
the school, have parties, get on teams, are adored by teachers, have all these
friends. Sure. They hate me. Day by day, it's like they take pieces out of you,
like a torture, one at a time. My school has 1,500 kids. I could never make a
sports team. I have never been to a party. I sit with my friends at our own corner
of the cafeteria. If we tried to join the other kids, they'd throw up or leave.
And by now, I'd rather die.
Sometimes, I do feel a lot of real pure rage. And I feel better when I go online.
Sometimes I think the games keep me from shooting anybody, not the other way around.
Cause I can get even there, and I'm pretty powerful there. But I'd never do it.
Something much deeper was wrong with these kids in Colorado. To shoot all those
people? Make bombs? You have to be sick, and the question they should be asking
isn't what games do they play, but how come all these high-paid administrators,
parents, teachers and so-called professional people, how come none of them noticed
how wacked they were? I mean, in the news it said they had guns all over their
houses! They were planning this for a year. Maybe the reporters ought to ask how
come nobody noticed this, instead of writing all these stupid stories about video
games?"
From ES in New York:
High school favors people with a certain look and attitude - the adolescent equivalent
of Aryans. They are the chosen ones, and they want to get rid of anyone who doesn't
look and think the way they do.
One of the things which makes this so infuriating is that the system favors shallow
people. Anyone who took the time to think about things would realize that things
like the prom, school spirit and who won the football game are utterly insignificant
in the larger scheme of things.
So anyone with depth of thought is almost automatically excluded from the main
high school social structure. It's like some horribly twisted form of Social Darwinism.
I would never, ever do anything at all like what was done in Colorado. I can't
understand how anyone could. But I do understand the hatred of high school life
which, I guess, prompted it.
From Dan in Boise, Idaho:
"Be careful! I wrote an article for my school paper. The advisor suggested
we write about ?our feelings? about Colorado. My feelings -what I wrote -- were
that society is blaming the wrong things. You can't blame screwed-up kids or the
Net. These people don't know what they were talking about. How bout blaming a
system that takes smart or weird kids and drives them crazy? How about understanding
why these kids did what they did, cause in some crazy way, I feel something for
them. For their victims, too, but for them. I thought it was a different point-of-view,
but important. I was making a point. I mean, I'm not going to the prom.
You know what? The article was killed, and I got sent home with a letter to my
parents. It wasn't an official suspension, but I can't go back until Tuesday.
And it was made pretty clear to me that if I made any noise about it, it would
be a suspension or worse. So this is how they are trying to figure out what happened
in Colorado, I guess. By blaming a sub-culture and not thinking about their own
roles, about how fucked-up school is. Now, I think the whole thing was a set-up,
cause a couple of other kids are being questioned too, about what they wrote.
They pretend to want to have a 'dialogue' but kids should be warned that what
they really want to know is who's dangerous to them."
From a Slashdot reader: "Your column Friday was okay, but you and a lot of
the Slashdot readers don't get it. You don't have the guts to stand up and say
these games are not only not evil, they are great. They are good. They are challenging
and stimulating. They help millions of kids who have nowhere else to go, because
the whole world is set up to take care of different kinds of kids, kids who fit
in, who do what they're told, who are popular. I've made more friends online on
Gamespot.com than I have in three years of high school. I think about my characters
and my competitions and battles all day.
Nothing I've been taught in school interests me as much. And believe me, the gamers
who (try to) kill me online all day are a lot closer to me than the kids I go
to high school with. I'm in my own world, for sure, but it's my choice and it's
a world I love. Without it, I wouldn't have one... Last week, my father told me
he had cancelled my ISP because he had asked me not to game so much and I still
was. And when he saw the Colorado thing online, he said, he told my Mom that he
felt one of these kids could be me'I am a resourceful geek, and I was back online
before he got to bed that night. But I have to go underground now.
My guidance counselor, who wouldn't know a computer game from Playboy Bunny poster,
told me was Dad was being a good parent, and here was a chance for me to re-invent
myself, be more popular, to ?mainstream.? This whole Colorado thing, it's given
them an excuse to do more of what started this trouble in the first place - to
make individuals and different people feel like even bigger freaks."
From Jip in New England:
"Dear Mr. Katz. I am 10. My parents took my computer away today, because
of what they saw on television. They told me they just couldn't be around enough
to make sure that I'm doing the right things on the Internet. My Mom and Dad told
me they didn't want to be standing at my funeral some day because of things I
was doing that they didn't know about. I am at my best friend's house, and am
pretty bummed, because things are boring now. I hope I'll get it back." |
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