“We went over to someone’s house and watched cartoons. We listened to music,” says Alejandra Marsh, 16. Harris and Klebold liked to bowl: when Harris made a good shot, he would throw his arm up, “Heil Hitler!”īut they were not really dangerous, right? Every school has its rebels, its Goths in black nail polish and lipstick, its stoners and deadbeats, sometimes, as in this case, the very brightest techie kids who found solidarity in exclusion. They reportedly wore swastikas on black shirts, spoke German in the halls, re-enacted World War II battles, played the most vicious video games, talked about whom they hated, whom they would like to kill. In the handwritten diary of one of the suspects, the anniversary, say the police, was clearly marked as a time to “rock and roll.” Some members of Harris’ and Klebold’s clique, tagged in derision a few years before as the Trench Coat Mafia, had embraced enough Nazi mythology to spook their classmates. “It’s weed-smoking day,” one student said, referring to the shorthand for going out and getting stoned: marijuana is supposed to contain 420 different chemicals: the Los Angeles police department’s code for a drug bust is 420.Īnd it was also, as we now know too well, Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Instead, noticed a student, it was something to the effect, “You don’t want to be here.” Below that was the date, not spelled out April 20, as was the custom, but written 4/20 in bold type, a pulsing message easily decoded. On the classroom video monitors, the “phrase of the day” was not exactly Ralph Waldo Emerson. There’s an arch over a hallway in the high school engraved with a motto: “The finest kids in America pass through these halls.” Now it’s a stretched finger of the big city, with aspiring families who don’t lock their doors, enclaves with names like Coventry and Raccoon Creek and Bel Flower, scrubland turned into golf courses, houses than run anywhere from $75,000 to $5 million or so. It was once a small prairie town of gold rushers and traders, where the biggest scare was getting hit by a prairie dog. It can even happen in Littleton, a town of 35,000 near the dusty-tan foothills of the Rockies, just southwest of Denver. Do we blame the parents, blame the savage music they listened to, blame the ease of stockpiling an arsenal, blame the chemistry of cruelty and cliques that has always been a part of high school life but has never been so deadly? Among the many things that did not survive the week was the hymn all parents unconsciously sing as they send their children out in the morning, past the headlines, to their schools: It can’t happen here, Lord, no, it could never happen here. It promises to be a long, hard talk, in public and in private, about why smart, privileged kids rot inside. The story of the slaughter at Columbine High School opened a sad national conversation about what turned two boys’ souls into poison. Among the kids who died and the ones who were prepared to die were the students who stayed behind to open a door, or save a friend, or build an escape route or barricade a closet or guide the descending SWAT teams into the darkness. They had no way of knowing what would be asked of them, what they were capable of. “There is no God,” he said, and he shot her in the head.īefore we inventory the evil we cannot fathom, consider the reflexes at work among these happy, lucky kids, born to a generation that is thought to know nothing about sacrifice. “There is a God,” she said quietly, “and you need to follow along God’s path.” The shooter looked down at her. Others didn’t want to leave their dying teacher when the SWAT team finally came: Can’t we carry him out on a folded-up table? A girl was asked by the gunman if she believed in God, knowing full well the safe answer. A boy with 10 bullet wounds in his leg picked up an explosive that landed by him and hurled it away from the other wounded kids. As Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris prowled the school with their guns and bombs, this is what the children did: a boy draped himself over his sister and her friend, so that he would be the one shot. By the end of that gruesome day, by the time 15 people had died, her friends among them, she had her yearbook of humanity and integrity signed in blood. She was in the choir room last Tuesday when something very different was walking the halls.
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