And we wonder why...
Useful list and timeline of shooting incidents, compiled by ABC News.
An excellent, heartbreaking compilation of Goth kids' responses.
Index of TIME Magazine's articles on Littleton, past shootings, and guns in America.
And we wonder why...
Useful list and timeline of shooting incidents, compiled by ABC News.
An excellent, heartbreaking compilation of Goth kids' responses.
Index of TIME Magazine's articles on Littleton, past shootings, and guns in America.
Articles on Shooting Incidents
Articles on Anti-Media Reaction to Columbine and other Incidents
The Demolition Ball -- "We Are Done Tonight!"
One night in the early summer of 1985 I had a dream so vivid and disturbing that I remember it exactly today, fourteen years later. I was living in Kirksville, Missouri then, a college town in the northeast corner of the state; we shared our local TV station with Ottumwa, Iowa, and in the dream that's exactly the station I was watching, checking the evening news.
The lead story
concerned the previous night's senior prom at a high school not far away.
It seemed that the senior class and Student Council had petitioned the school authorities for an unusual dispensation as regarded that year's prom: they wanted to make all the arrangements entirely themselves, no outside (read: adult) involvement whatever. And this had been seen as an admirable sign of enterprise and maturity, so the seniors had gotten their wish. All the arrangements were duly made, food and music equipment packed in, the kids arrived on time...and then, as the evening grew late and the moms and dads arrived in the parking lot to take them home, no one came out. The doors were tested and found to be barred from the inside. At last they broke in, and faced a holocaust: the lights all blazing, the taped music still playing, and the whole senior class lying dead. They had poisoned the food and punch, everything edible. The banner that hung over the stage said "The Demolition Ball - We Are Done Tonight!"
And when the few kids who had decided against going to the prom, and survived, were interviewed, the full truth came out.
It hadn't been the act of a crazed killer or two; it was a collective decision. The seniors had deliberately planned their prom as a mass suicide. Everyone had known. The ones who had stayed home were the ones who had chosen to live.
This dream was so real that I checked the TV and print news every night for a week afterward to make sure it hadn't really happened. (In the dream, in fact, I went directly to the scene to see if I could speak to any of the survivors, but I don't think any of them would tell me anything; or if they did I've lost it.) It has haunted me ever since, especially when something like Columbine or Decatur happens, when someone decides that "we are done tonight". The situation in my dream is still, thank all gods, unique: nowhere has a whole graduating class of kids decided that their future was so hopeless and barren that there was no point in even trying to live there. But the terrible, stark quality of that central panorama, the bright lights, the sparkly decorations, the hall carefully trimmed with such bitter irony, and the tumbled piles of bodies - no blood, no bulletholes, all the dead kids in their best dresses and black ties - it stays with me as indelibly as if it had happened.
And the worst thing about it that it does not seem impossible. It didn't then and it sure as hell doesn't now. The despair, the alienation, the submerged anger of real kids who look just fine on the surface is no dream.
...more to come....
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