The world is becoming an increasingly tough place to live in. The recent shootings in the Colorado high school are just another example of the alarming trend of kids not being able to take a joke.
Color me insensitive to the fragile human psyche, but I find the whole thing ridiculous. If, as evidence and witnesses suggest, the horrible massacre was a result of the "Trench Coat Mafia" -- a bunch of marginal, misunderstood, angst-ridden teenagers -- merely seeking ultimate revenge on the students who made fun of them, then they broke some key rules.
The first rule, and this is far too often learned the hard way, is to not wear black trench coats to school. That's like wearing a sign that says, "Look at me, I'm making a statement that I am different from you and should therefore be made fun of mercilessly." Rule two is to not listen to Marilyn Manson. He's probably a regular guy who tried his hand at the whole corporate recruiting thing but decided there was more money in exploiting the vacuous, angst-ridden lives of America's youth. Plus he gets to eat kittens and stuff.
An old high school friend of mine, Ben, now a freshman at Yale, called me the other day to ask me if I had heard about the Columbine High School shootings. After explaining to him that while Hanover is not yet the cesspool of modern urbanity that is New Haven, we're not completely isolated from the real world, and that I had heard about the massacre.
During our conversation, Ben pointed out that if the killings occurred at our school, Columbia High School, instead of Columbine High School, we would probably have been among the first victims. He said that the killers targeted high school athletes and the people who made fun of them. Both Ben and I were high school athletes and were the kind of kids that would no doubt make fun of any trench coat wearing kids we saw. I joked that we probably would have survived, since most of the killing took place in the library, a place we didn't frequent often.
Later on, however, his words began to sink in. Would I have lost my life because of a few more insensitive jokes? There was a girl in my high school who always wore a cape. Being the clever high school wordsmith that I was, I quickly thought up a funny and witty nickname for her: Capegirl. We used to make fun of her, without ever really knowing anything about her. Was I one wisecrack away from pushing Capegirl over the edge? There was this one really snobby, stuck-up guy whose father bought him a brand new red sports car. The first day he parked it at school, someone who had found out he was lactose intolerant doused the car in a dozen gallons of sour milk. Could this have been more than just a silly prank, could this have been the match that lit the fuse of another school massacre?
In my column, I've written some potentially offensive stuff from time to time. And anyone who's talked with me knows that I far too often make senseless, tasteless jokes that are about as far from political correctness as Richard Simmons is from heterosexuality. But I refuse to believe that that could somehow cost me my life.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I long for the old school way of doing things. If you got picked on as a kid (and come on, who didn't?), you didn't go to therapy or see counselors and you sure as hell didn't bring in a small arsenal and open fire on the lunch ladies. If you didn't want people to make fun of you, you didn't wear a black trench coat year round and play "war games." If you got a bad grade on a test or your cat died you didn't paint your nails black and start worshipping Satan. When the "cool kids" didn't pick you for their basketball team, you didn't go home and eat a whole bottle of sleeping pills. It used to be that when the bully took your lunch money or you found out that Mommy drinks because you cry, you never would have considered seeing a psychologist or taking a meat-clever to your enemies. If your parents got divorced you didn't withdraw from the world around you, you merely accepted the fact that your parents would now vie for your love and affection
by showering you with expensive gifts. It's time we went back to the ideology upon which this beautiful country was founded. We need to return to the old way of dealing with life's endless stream of bitter disappointments and just bottle everything up inside.
