I graduated high school the year before the Columbine shooting. Columbine was a neighboring high school, only a few miles from mine. That day was a bad day for me. I kept thinking "that could have been me." In retrospect, I don't think it could have. I don't think I could've ever brought myself to do such a thing. But I understood the urge. The despair and the rage.
The initial post that started this semi-diary blog was an emotion dump after a mass shooting. I guess here's another one.
I feel lucky to have survived high school. Many of my peers feel the same way. High school is torturous on many levels, and it's commonly accepted that analogies to prison aren't far off, though not to the same scale. Sleep deprivation, social gangs, enforced idleness, and helplessness rule the day. I've never heard anyone in high school say it was anything but various levels of awful. I have heard someone say "I wrote myself a letter about high school when I graduated, because I knew it was likely that in the future I would look back on that time with rose-colored glasses. I'm glad I did, it helps me to remember how bad that place is."
Yes, "depression," granted. But depression isn't one-way. It's not only causal, it's also caused, and the high school experience certainly kindled my years of depression just as much as the depression made high school worse. High school shouldn't have to be a thing that young people must survive. Even if nearly all of them do manage it.
I have a friend a couple years younger than me with a complicated relationship with Columbine. After the shooting, life in school got significantly better for [them]. Because now other social gangs were far more reluctant to engage in abuse of [their] social group. It feels disgusting to say anything that can be mistaken as an implication that Columbine was justified. Murder is monstrous. How fucked up is the situation in our high schools if an act of terrorism can make life better for a significant percentage of students?
Among all the calls for gun control and mental health services, no one is saying anything about what it is that breaks a lot of people. No one mentions this environment, which many people have to spend untold dollars and many years of therapy recovering from once they escape. No one talks about what could drive someone to pick up that gun and lash out in rage at the place and the people they view as responsible for their pain.
I know, this isn't the only cause of school shootings, nor the only type of shooter. And even for those who may fit this template, there are many inputs that lead to this, from our American history of violence, to social contagion, to personal psychological pathology, among dozens more. Yet high school remains horrible and torturous for many young people. And it should not be this way.
I don't have much faith in my society to fix this. We've known for at least a decade that simply pushing back the start time of high schools leads to improved mental and physical health for teenagers, as well as improved education outcomes. And yet we can't even manage to take that first, simple, step. Instead, our schools become more and more like prisons every year, with stricter security and greater authoritarian control. Things are trending the wrong way.
But for the first time in my life, I think I am at a point where I can actually say this sort of thing out loud, rather than just emotion-dumping on a blog. Our schools must stop being places that damage those people we force into them.