Summer
1999 Update
to the Elect Hobie Homepage
The Best Culture Quotes: Kids
Now I hope people will ease up on the dorks."
D. Yorovesky, high school senior, Los Angeles
"They'd walk with their heads down, because if
they looked up they'd get thrown into lockers and get called a 'fag.'"
M. Scrodin, Junior at Columbine High School about Harris and Klebold.
"I killed because people like me are mistreated
every day. My whole life I felt outcasted, alone." Luke Woodham, who killed
his mother and 3 students on October 1, 1997 in Pearl, Mississippi.
"He said he was sick off being made fun of.
He said 'I'll shoot you. I'll shoot you.'" M. Pollock, tenth
grader at Columbine High School on Harris when he pulled out a shotgun
in the school parking lot several months ago.
"He was a nerd. In home room when everyone
else was socializing he'd sit and do his homework." J. Smith on Thomas
Soloman, shooter at Heritage High School in Conyers, Ga.
"There is a growing body of research that
shows that the core element of abuse is psychological. Physical aggression
has no anti-social impact unless it is part of psychological abuse.
Getting picked on at school can be the most damaging." Marla Brasard,
Columbia Univ.
"In a society where television shows like
"Friends' and 'Seinfeld' teach us to single out and ridicule those with
unusual physical or personality traits... it is no wonder that teenagers
have picked up the misguided lesson that 'normal' is good and 'unusual'
must be criticized. This attitude has a chain-reaction effect, because
children who are made to feel like social outcasts during formative years
can bear resentment, frustration and a desire to do something about it."
J. Lisi NYT Letters 4/24/99
When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were caught
breaking into a a van, they were sentenced to a diversion program that
included anger management and community service; it has been reported that
when some popular jocks were caught doing the same thing, they were given
a warning; and that Eric Harris began his plans for the massacre the day
after; an act of revenge on the popular crowd they blamed for making them
feel like outcasts.
"A photograph of the Class of '99 at Columbine
High School appears to be a striking example of the marginalized status
of these two young men. In a sea of mostly smiling faces, Mr. Klebold
and Mr. Harris, heads bent eyes a bit downcast, are far toward a corner
as they can be -- quite literally on the fringes of the crowd." NYT
4/26/99
"Every school has cliques; they are inherent
in adolescent life. To change that you have to make people move directly
from age 10 to age 30.... In the meantime, a small suggestion:
schools can require all of their students to wear uniforms, so as to reduce
the chances of cults forming around modes of dress. And a vast one:
stop telling schools that they cannot teach about religious alternatives
to modish culture. And a grim one: we have created a new kind
of adolescent culture, one that we may never be able to fix." James
Q. Wilson, emeritus professor at UCLA, in NYT 4/26/99
***********
"All jocks stand up. We're going to
kill every one of you." Harris and Klebold.
Eric Harris's 2 year older brother Kevin played
football for Columbine High School and was popular, "just the kind of guy
his brother was gunning for," said a classmate of the older Harris brother.
NYT 4/26/99
"At Bear Creek [Col.] High School, I can tell
you for sure that if you wanted to kill a bunch of athletes the worst place
you could go is the library." T. Thnell, football coach
"The jocks don't bother anyone. They
have the run of the school because they are the top of the mountain."
A. Ranglas, football team captain at Torrey Pines [Ca.] High School
"Felony arrests among pro and college athletes
may or may not be rising, but the better reporting makes it clear that
many of them cannot turn off their aggressive behavior at the buzzer."
R. Lipstyle in NYT 5/9/9
"I think it's everybody who achieves, not
just athletes. If there's anybody who gets attention, no matter if
it's athletes or people in drama or cheer leading or whatever, it's resented."
C. Vagotis, Miami [Fla.] Sunset High
"In these big high-powered suburban schools,
there's a very dominate winner culture, including the jocks, the advanced
placement kids, the student government, and depending on the school, the
drama kids or service clubs. But the winners are a smaller group
than we'd like to think and high school life is very different for those
who experience it as the losers. They become part of the invisible
middle and suffer in silence, alienated and without any real connection
to any adult." Carol Miller Lieber, Cambridge Mass.
"The kids most likely to be left unattended
for long periods were middle class, in sprawling professional suburbs.
Isolated for long periods of time, there's no counter-balancing force to
fantasy. Dr. L. Steinberg NYT 5/6/99
"You can blame a parent only until you've
become a parent." Dr. Cohen, Director of Yale Univ. Child Studies
Center "This country doesn't think as much about its children and
their future as it does about how to clean up streams."
*********
"Sooner or later there's going to be another
incident and basically it's all about how lucky you are...." Nick
Komadis, New Brunswick NJ High School senior, quoted in NYT
"I look out the window right now and I see a cop
car, and that doesn't make me feel safe." S. Aboelez, South Brunswick
[NJ] High School, where access doors are locked and there is a ban on wearing
long coats and carrying backpacks so students carry their books in see-through
plastic bags.
"Even if students know about something or
someone with a weapon at school, no one wants to nark them out. That's
how it is in society. If you tell on someone once then you're considered
a nark for a long time and it's not something you want said about you."
I'm a junior in high school. I have
been thinking about the Littleton shootings all day. Everyone keeps
saying 'it won't happen here,' but you can't know for sure. Sara
Hedges, Pellston, Mi.
Professor John Cole of Duke University said
he feared a copycat pattern: that "...one school shooting makes another
more likely because the action validates a fantasy of someone who would
normally not be moved to violence. As such, judging from the body count,
that pattern is escalating." T. Egan in NYT, 4/22/99
Two 14 year old boys were arrested in Port
Huron Michigan for planning a shooting spree in a gym assembly and a bomb
afterward to top the death toll of the April 20th shootings at Columbine
High School.
Calling in threats gives kids a sense of power
and importance to know that they caused panic.
"The inhibitions of children are loosened
after a violent event. Something that was off-limits before is suddenly
possible because someone else did it." L. Sullivan, National Association
of School Psychologists
"Just because we can't do everything to make
our schools absolutely safe doesn't mean we shouldn't take the first step."
M. Summer, school board chair, Newman, Ga.
Thomas Solomon, the 15 year old who opened
fire on his classmates in Conyers, Ga. had attended a youth service at
his family's Catholic church the night before the shooting, and had been
given a handgun as a gift from his parents, but they took it away when
they learned he had been carrying it around, but according to a friend,
he knew where it was hidden. T. Saladino. AP 5/21/99
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church
called on Presbyterians to remove handguns and all assault weapons from
their homes. The Methodist Church commended that action.
***********
"The shootings in Littleton were not by deprived
youths, and they were not carried out by an obviously depraved single gunman,
who could be written off as a psycho. Rather they happened in a 'Leave
It to Beaver' neighborhood -- and the gunmen were Wally and Eddie Haskell.
Until we unearth the psychological smoking gun that explains how a young
man of privilege could go to the prom on the weekend and then shoot up
his own classmates the next week, it is going to gnaw at the country."
Thomas Friedman NYT 5/4/99
"Human life and the problem of evil are simply
not reducible to solutions of the best science, social psychology or even
common sense. Life is messy whether or not we adopt the most enlightened
public policy or private behavior." J. Petulla Letters NYT 5/14/99
"I suggest that the recent killings represent
an increase in violence of a qualitative different type. Past homicides
statistics were inflated by turf battles among gangs, which is a violence
in the service of a particular subculture. These more recent attacks represent
a violent rebellion against the social order as a whole -- attacks on the
socially successful by socially rejected children. While it is obvious
that we must remove guns from the hands of children, we must also address
the issue of what happens to the losers in a competitive society that values
only winners." Johann Freedman, NYT Letters 4/24/99
"There has never in the history of the civilized
world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance
and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and
allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world
of friendship and peers." Wm. Damon, Stanford Center on Adolescence.
"Dr. Damon said he was stunned when he went to Littleton, Colo. after the
high school shootings there last month, to find parents saying they felt
they had no business learning what their children were doing on the Internet....
Dr. Damon said the goal of increased interaction with adults would be to
make it clear that while so-called typical adolescent behavior may be normal,
it is also normal for adults to stop it. " NYT 5/30/99
"If you had come to me six weeks ago and asked
if this act was possible in our community, I would have said this was the
last place in America where this could happen. So what I have to
say is, this could happen anywhere." Dave Thomas, Jefferson County
District Attorney.
"Four days before the shootings, the principal
of Columbine High School, Frank DeAngelis, told his students at an emotional
pep rally that he did not want to bury another young person. With
the prom set for the next night, Saturday, he implored them not to drink,
or drink and drive, or put themselves in risk in any way. Mr. DeAngelis
said he had the students close their eyes and repeat: 'I am an important
part of the Columbine family. I value life. I will make wise
choices each and every day of my life.' 'Then I told them, I want
you to open your eyes and look at the person next to you and visualize
what it would be like if they weren't there on Monday morning. I
told them I want to see all your smiling faces here on Monday morning.
And on Monday morning, after a weekend in which not so much as a fender
bender was reported, the principal said one of the students came up to
me and said 'I think all our smiling faces are here.'" S. Rimer,
reporting in NYT
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