A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(3)

Two kinds of crime upset us more than any others: crimes in which children are the victims, and crimes in which children are the perpetrators. In the first case, we mourn the innocent; in the second, our misapprehension that children are innocent. School shootings are the most appalling crimes of all, because they involve both problems, and among school shootings Columbine remains something of a gold standard, the ultimate exemplar to which all others are indebted. The extreme self-importance tinged with sadism, the randomness of the attack, and the scale of the advance planning have made Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold heroes to a large community of causeless young rebels, while they are hailed by most people as psychologically damaged and by some religious communities as icons of Satanism. The boys’ motives and purposes have been analyzed time and again by people who want to protect their children from such assaults. The most dauntless parents also wonder how to be certain that their children are incapable of committing such crimes. Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don’t know, says the adage, and Columbine was above all an ambush of unknowability, of horror hidden in plain sight.

It has been impossible to see the killers clearly. We live in a society of blame, and some of the victims’ families were relentless in their demand for impossible “answers” that were being kept “hidden.” The best evidence that the parents didn’t know is the surety that if they had, they’d have done something. Jefferson County magistrate John DeVita said of the two boys, “What’s mind-boggling is the amount of deception. The ease of their deception. The coolness of their deception.” Most parents think they know their children better than they do; children who don’t want to be known can keep their inner lives very private. The victims’ families’ lawsuits were predicated on the dubious principles that human nature is knowable, that interior logic can be monitored, and that tragedies follow predictable patterns. They have sought some missing information that would change what happened. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “Evil is not an appearance,” adding that “knowing its causes does not dispel it.” Sartre seems not to have been read very much in the Denver suburbs.

Eric Harris appears to have been a homicidal psychopath, and Dylan Klebold, a suicidal depressive, and their disparate madnesses were each other’s necessary condition. Dylan’s depressiveness would not have turned into murderousness without Harris’s leadership, but something in Eric might have lost motivation without the thrill of dragging Dylan down with him. Eric’s malice is shocking, Dylan’s acquiescence, equally so. Dylan wrote, “Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life—that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe—my mind, body, everywhere, everything is at PEACE—me—my soul (existence).” He described his own, “eternal suffering in infinite directions through infinite realities.” The most common word in his journals is love. Eric wrote, “how dare you think that I and you are part of the same species when we are sooooooooo different. you arent human, you are a robot…and if you pissed me off in the past, you will die if I see you.” His journal describes how in some imagined collegiate future he would have tricked girls to come to his room and raped them. Then, “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a fucking wolf, strangle them, squish their head, rip off their jaw, break their arms in half, show them who is god.” Eric was a failed Hitler; Dylan was a failed Holden Caulfield.

Sue Klebold emphasizes the suicidal element in her son’s death. Karl Menninger, who has written extensively on suicide, said that it requires the coincidence of “the wish to kill, the wish to be killed, and the wish to die.” The wish to kill is not always directed outward, but it is an essential piece of the puzzle. Eric Harris wanted to kill and Dylan Klebold wanted to die, and both thought their experience contained seeds of the divine; both wrote of how the massacre would make them into gods. Their combination of grandiosity and ineptitude contains echoes of ordinary adolescence. In the commons at Columbine High School, toward the end of the spree, a witness hiding in the cafeteria heard one of the killers say, “Today the world’s going to come to an end. Today’s the day we die.” This is an infantile conflation of the self with the other. G. K. Chesterton wrote, “The man who kills a man kills a man The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”

Advocates for the mentally ill point out that most crime is not committed by people with mental illnesses, and that most people with mental illnesses do not commit crimes. What does it mean to consider Columbine as the product of minds that were not mentally ill? There are many crimes that people resist either because they know they’d get in trouble or because they have learned moral standards. Most people have seen things they’d like to steal. Most people have felt an occasional flash of murderous rage toward someone with whom they are intimate. But the reasons for not killing kids you barely know at school and holding the place hostage is not that you fear punishment or grapple with received morality; it’s that the whole idea never crosses healthy minds. Though he was depressed, Dylan did not have schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar illness, or any other condition that fits the neat parameters of psychiatric diagnosis. The existence of disordered thinking does not mitigate the malevolence of Dylan’s acts. Part of the nobility of this book is that it doesn’t try to render what he did into sense. Sue Klebold’s refusal to blame the bullies, the school, or her son’s biochemistry reflects her ultimate determination that one must simply accept what can never be explained away. She does not try to elucidate the permanently confused borderline between evil and disease.