Some Kids in Trenchcoats


The Basketball Diaries - See Footnote*

Once upon a time, there was a little town. And in that little town was a high school. The high school was attended by mainly white, mainly middle-class students. Most of them were pretty much what you would expect.
But not all of them. There was a group that seemed not only to be outcasts, but to take perverse pleasure in being outcasts. They wore mainly black, and affected trenchcoats even in warm weather. They bought space in the yearbook and used it for vaguely threatening messages. They despised the jocks, and the people who became successful by conforming to the expectations of others. They scoffed at religion. They kept a list of people they wanted to see dead.
Hold up, you say, I've heard this story and I don't want to hear it again.

No, you haven't.
The year was not 1999, but 1996. The location was not Colorado, but upstate New York. And the band of angry outcasts didn't call themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia. We called ourselves DYA. (Stands for Disgruntled Youth of America**, in case you're wondering.)
Let me tell you, it was nice to be on the inside of something like that. After ten or eleven years of being scared every day -- scared not necessarily because of anything anyone's ever done to you, but by what you suspect they want to do to you, the fist that's behind the snub and the rape that's behind the insult -- the only peace that seems attainable is the power to scare them back. After feeling like you're an invisible being in a soundproof box, it's validating to find people who agree with you, even if they're just as ignored as you are. DYA marked the first step in the turn-around of my self-esteem, which had been so ravaged by jr. high as to be non-existent. Had we been suppressed, there would have been a tailspin in my life from which I might well never have recovered.
But from the outside we probably looked like something that should have been suppressed, in light of the conventional wisdom about how to keep school shootings from happening. We talked endlessly of guns, bombs, nukes, Machiavelli and Marx (but not Hitler; we hated the 'fascism' of the school system too much to be a fan of his.) We weren't adverse to being confrontational, either.
Reading the papers now I am slammed by the realization that if these shootings had occurred three years earlier, or I had been born three years later, I'd be in jail right now for the unpardonable crime of being young, bright, and angry. As fate would have it, though, we were in our prime in 1996, the current wave of school shootings hadn't started yet, and so we were reluctantly tolerated. And we never did get around to killing anybody, or committing any kind of criminal enterprise (except the knives on school grounds thing.) We all went off to college. We don't keep in touch any more. It's kind of anti-climactic.
So if some kids need these things to be okay, what do I suggest we do to prevent further school shootings? Nothing. They can't be prevented. They are part of the necessary and inevitable collateral damage of living in a country where we have free expression, up to and including the right to be rude to nerds or offensive to normals. Some people under such conditions are just going to snap, always. If you want to live in a society where politeness is legislated, feel free to move to one. I recommend Singapore. If you want to live in America, don't try to legislate or dress code the Trenchcoat Mafias and DYAs, the "gangs" and cliques, out of existance. They are exactly what some of us need, and if fifteen of us commit suicide for want of that support that's no less tragic than Klebold and Harris's tally. Accept that the land of the free produces loose cannons frm time to time. Let us all live (or not) happily ever after.


*I've never seen The Basketball Diaries. In 1996 I don't think anyone in DYA had seen The Basketball Diaries. We loathed basketball. I haven't seen Natural Born Killers, either, and I've never played Doom.

**There's another Disgruntled Youth of America out there, too, but they aren't anywhere near as disgruntled as we were, and nothing I say here necessarily applies to them.
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