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darkfae-xiv · 6 years

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I got to this episode of Murder with Friends (though on TYT directly, it’s not broken up into different parts - Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here on YouTube).

Here’s a cut for anyone who still can’t handle what occurred the spring of 1999.

I was in high school when Columbine happened. My district was actually heading towards the end of Spring Break when it occurred; I was slated to go to the “bad kids school” because the way school was handled where I grew up was utterly terrible for anyone who was highly intellectual (they basically stopped teaching anything new around 8th grade for the majority of subjects, and just started reteaching it all, and that isn’t good learning for someone who was already on college levels for reading, sciences, and general comprehension), and they were making a last ditch effort to help me graduate (spoilers: I got two semesters of work at 4.0 done while I was there, because it was just grabbing packets, going over them yourself, and then doing the work, which was way better for me).

While the event itself was highly disturbing, as at the very least Dylan was in the same sort of social caste as I was in school so there were always thoughts of “Could one of my friends – the outcasts who aren’t entirely outcasts – end up doing the same”. The narrative immediately following Columbine was the *worst* thing for anyone who wasn’t a yuppy preppy, as all over the nation poor Goth and Punk kids like myself and my friends were being persecuted for something the vast majority of them would *never even consider doing*, largely because of the sudden blame on Marilyn Manson (who was inaccurately considered Goth music, when he’s actually more like European Death Metal) and simple black trenchcoats.

There was a girl at my school who was super poor, and well before Columbine, her parents managed to get her a really decent black trechcoat from a charity store, and she got beat up and bullied in the aftermath to the point where she dropped out of school – and she wasn’t even a Goth or Punk kid, she was a good little Catholic girl.

One of my friends who was already out of high school, who wore a black trenchcoat since the style was what was comfortable with him, and he wore black and white with bright coloured accessories or metallic accessories, so his coat was black with silver accents – he got jumped when he was walking through downtown one night, trying to get to a friend’s house that was located on the other side. He was a high ranking hopkido student, so he managed to not get beat down like these thugs (yeah, they’re thugs – beating someone up over a trenchcoat is super thuggish) as they had intended. The way the were speaking to him as they approached, and as the fight started, they signalled they had every intent to send him to the hospital.

I myself had to deal with the officials from my former high school – primarily the principle – calling up my new high schools officials and fretting over whether or not I would commit such a crime over being sent there. My principle was hella classy and responded with, “They could build an atomic bomb on their own, but that doesn’t mean they would. No, they’re not going to gun down the school. Stop it.”

One of the largely unaddressed legacies of Columbine was how shitty Goth and Punk kids, along with anyone in a black trenchcoat, were treated afterwards – and that continued for years, largely until other school shootings/mass shootings occurred and the gunmen *weren’t* Goth or Punk or wearing black trenchcoats and listening to Marilyn Manson. People slowly started waking up to the fact that *anyone* could have the kind of mental issues that lead to a mass shooting.

Columbine also birthed the bollocks ideal that violent video games – and video games in general – make people more violent, and turns them into murderers, something that still lingers even today, despite the fact that peer reviewed study after study has proven that to be patently false, and proven that quite the opposite is occurring: by being given an outlet for pent up anger and stress, society has decreased the level of violence that was formerly innate in the population. Some psychologists believe it helped decrease the number of serial killers, as the numbers that were going around in the crazy 60s/70s dropped dramatically; while numerous factors have contributed to that, the ability to vent one’s frustrations *safely* is likely one of the larger factors. Given that I was working in tech, and then eventually in the video game industry itself, that narrative pissed me right off – I had been playing video games since the Commodore64, and even more heavily after the Atari was made, so I felt this huge resentment towards the narrative that video games made people murderers.

Sadly, the clip that you played from Bowling for Columbine, with Marilyn Manson speaking, hit things pretty squarely on the head – no one listens when children (or even adults) are speaking about things that society likes to shove aside, and that’s part of what causes things like this and things like suicide; people ignoring the pain and suffering that someone is trying to express how they’re feeling, society still largely doesn’t know how to handle the ever increasing mental illness cases (that’s a whole different rant from me, btw), and so we end up with people missing the signs that would have stopped horrific death from occurring. I may have little love for Manson’s music, or what happened to the Goth/Punk community because of it, but I totally respect the man’s uncanny insight and amazing intelligence. He was so right about everything he spoke about in that clip, and then some.

Anyway, thank you for giving us space to speak about this incident. It still really unsettles me, because of everything that happened the spring of 1999 because of it. It’s hard to watch most things related to Columbine, but Murder with Friends handled it really well. I’m not sure if part of that has to do with the fact we had two different perspectives – one of someone who wasn’t American, and one of someone who lived through the time – but I think that helped a lot. It also helps that in more recent years, there’s been a more objective focus when people pour over the information from Harris and Klebold’s life, rather than simply writing them off as monsters without any objective thought and reflection.

#A Fae Original #Non-XIV #columbine massacre #murder with friends #murderwithfriends #personal #mildly ranty #i am still hugely fucked up from this event #From Fae's Queue

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