Revisionist History

I'm tired of it, quite frankly. Queen Ann put it thusly:

For liberals, history began this morning.

And we're seeing the "Columbine-ization" of psyCho:

High school classmates say gunman was bullied

Yep. He was picked on. Bullied. Laughed at. Just like the Columbine shooters. If only someone had stopped the incessant bullying, this could have been avoided.

Bullshit.

First of all, the idea that the Columbine shooters were "bullied" is a media creation. By all accounts from people in the school and from the area, the "trench coat mafia" as they liked to call them selves actively sought confrontation with the jocks and "in crowd". That they would deliberately provoke the so-called bullies by taunting them, walking hand-in-hand (not that there's anything wrong with that), etc. That they had multiple "rumbles" with the jocks that allegedly bullied them to the point of mass murder.

Let me tell you something, folks. When a group of kids is actually bullying you, the last fucking thing in the world you want to do is provoke them. Let me take you on a painful walk down Amnesia Lane and offer a glimpse into the world of someone that was bullied. Me.

I had a lot of strikes against me:

• Dad was a cop. In the 1970s, cops were "the man", and it was de rigueur to lash out at "the man" for all his wrongs against society. This is coming of age after the civil rights unrest, forced busing, integration, etc. combined with the rise of television and news coverage. People saw, live and direct in their living rooms, police beating on protestors. Police dragging "peaceful" protestors away from nuclear plants. The days of Officer Krupke were over.
• I was a chubby kid. "Husky" if you will. Always last to be picked for any sports event at recess; the kid who, when picked (grudgingly) would engender a sigh of defeat from the team that chose him.
• I skipped second grade. I basically finished first grade in the first quarter, spend the second quarter screwing around and making the teacher's life difficult, and was promoted to second grade halfway through the third quarter of school. I got the worst of both worlds - not only was I the "smart kid", but I was also the "new kid" to boot. Talk about a target... (As a side note, I've spent pretty much the rest of my life "playing dumb" because of the taunts and bullying I got for being "the smart kid").
• Because I skipped second grade, I was a year younger than my classmates, which meant that my growth lagged well behind everyone else's. I was, for the better part of a decade, the smallest boy in the class and the second or third smallest kid. So, smart kid, new kid, small kid... Yeah. Lots of memories from grammar school and junior high. None good.

Basically, I got beaten up, pushed down, kicked, tripped, lunch taken, knocked over, teased, shunned, ignored, and otherwise put down every day from the time I was 7 until high school (my parents shipped me off to a private high school not out of concern for my well-being but as a vendetta against the school superintendent - I was going to be "challenged", you see, and my grades were going to skyrocket once I was taught correctly. This would then "prove" that the local schools were mismanaged, etc. They were disappointed. But that's a story unto itself).

And yeah, I tried fighting back. Got my ass whipped over and over again. Being a year younger than everyone else, coupled with a complete and utter lack of concern from my parents (i.e. Dad's only words of advise to me were "Don't come crying to me if you lose the fight"), I'd get maybe one or two licks in before two or three kids pounded the crap out of me. I took to hiding in the library, which only served to ratchet the taunting up another 5 or 6 notches. "Bookworm". "Geek". "Teacher's pet". That one was especially ironic, as the teacher was generally the only person I could count on to not harass me - no shit I was the "teacher's pet".

I know about bullying. Been there, done that, don't want the t-shirt.

psyCho was teased because he "talked differently"? Boo fucking hoo. Told to go back to China? C'mon.

This cat had some serious mental issues, and for whatever reasons, be they political correctness, sloppy handling, or significant deficiencies in how we handle folks with mental problems, he was not treated properly. But to boil it down to "bullying", like they did with Columbine, does both the victims of bullying and those that suffer from mental illness a disservice. For example, now any child who gets bullied will be suspected of being the next psyCho. Talk about adding insult to injury - the last line of defense (telling an adult) just got yanked out from under a bullied kid, because that adult is going to call the cops thinking they've got the next campus shooter in front of them.

It also takes the onus off the mental health field, none of it for good reason. We need to devote more time and energy into identifying those that really need help and getting them the treatment they need - and damn the political correctness bullshit that prevents it. "Oh, we don't want to damage their self-esteem"? Fuck you. This crazy fuckwit things he's the second coming of Jesus Christ. Get him the fuck out of general pop and figure out how to cure what ails him. Don't write a script for Zoloft and send him on his way, confident that you haven't damaged his fragile ego.

And maybe, just maybe, we can start to figure out why people snap and decide to take others with them. Rather than developing wicked tunnel vision and focus on the tool used, let's try to decipher why they felt that killing a bunch of people would be the appropriate response. Maybe they were "teaching society a lesson". Maybe they were sharing their pain. Or maybe they cynically reasoned that it was the easiest way to become famous. Stranger things have happened.

But to pigeonhole it as "he was a bullied kid who snapped" is a cheap, quick cop-out that's only going to lead to more of the same. As the media perpetuates the myth that these were all poor, put-upon kids who had taken year after year of bullying until they snapped, more and more kids are going to latch onto the idea that taking a bunch of their tormenters out will not only "get back at them" but also make them famous. And believe me, the idea of everyone knowing who you are is quite attractive to a kid who only wants to melt into the background.

One last thing. As I mentioned above, my dad was a cop. That meant that, growing up, there were guns in our house. Loaded guns. Unsecured loaded guns. With lots of ammo. Not once did I even dream of walking into school with a gun either for protection or to do harm to others.

It's not the guns. It's not the easy accessibility to firearms. That's a bullshit excuse that blames the "how" of a mass murder rather than the "why". It's a helluva lot easier to say "guns are easy to get, let's pass laws against guns" than to say "why do these killers feel the need to take others with them" and look into the reasons behind a mass killing. It's the easy way out. And it's far beyond time we started looking at the harder questions. Because by focusing on the tools, by concentrating our efforts on the quick fix, we're only allowing the "why" to fester and get worse.

And there will be more victims. On all sides.