Author and Columnist
I just read an article about how one of the people who was killed in Columbine is supposed to be a martyr. There are so many things wrong with all of this...
I wish that I had better news. I should, but you grew up into an imperfect, reactionary world with twisted morals. A world that learns its lessons would have healed from this, but that wouldn't benefit the NRA and the assorted other groups that saw (and continue to see) this tragedy as a way to increase coffers and expand influence.
We have had more school shootings since Columbine than I care to count. I know it exceeds a hundred. I cannot promise you that it doesn't surpass two hundred. The only reason that it has slowed this year is that we are still trying to cope with a deadly pandemic that kept students home.
Those two maladjusted adolescents are still held up as heroes by the worst elements of the populace. Klebold and Harris were nearly trendsetters, showing scumbags a way to get their name onto the front page of the internet by destroying lives on a lark. They were not victims. They were not bullied, no matter the false narrative. They were the bullies. They were the sexually harassing, victimizing half-wits with too easy access to guns. There are so many of them littering police blotters, none victims.
Some people memorialized the shooters thereafter, calling them the victims of circumstances and unmet needs. To this, I offed the firmest middle finger. So many have it so worse than those jackasses and they do not decide to shoot up innocent people. They could have met their needs by acting like human beings and not soulless jackals.
You suffered personally because of them. You liked the alternative scene and had long hair. You wore trench coats (though the shooters barely did and the Trench coat Mafia was not a group that existed; it was largely people who were not the shooters' friends and did not refer to themselves as anything). At least two of your teachers asked, in the middle of class, if you were going to shoot-up the school. Aside from being truly baffled and offended that they would ask this with such an audience, you replied that you liked school and most people in it and that you feared hurting people. They conceded that the kid whose only complaint in the world was having been dumped hard the year before and having to go to a college he did not prefer was unlikely to be a school shooter. You were well-liked in high school and into college because you were outgoing, friendly, smart, kind, and cute enough to get dates. You couldn't understand being that angry and disaffected.
Anyway, what does it matter who said they believe in God? What if she said she believed in the Goddess or the almighty Vishnu? Is she LESS of a martyr? And how exactly is she a martyr? What grand cause did she die for?
Ah, Cassie Bernall. I've heard that she wasn't the one whom the boys asked, "Do you believe in God?" before she was shot dead. She was just killed, a complete innocent who did not have the time to answer a sadistic question. The girl who was asked survived the shooting and her parents did not write a book about it to proselytize. Not that I can blame her parents for doing this. If one's daughter died, surely it must have been a part of a grander plan than that bullies decided to shoot up a school for the fun of it. That the world is cold and indifferent is a hard pill to swallow. Yes, claiming this story happened to your dead daughter is a little unnerving, but it is far from the worst part of the tragedy.
Columbine is not a story with action heroes, but it is one that has been mythologized and has provided a template that resonates to this day. What is the great harm in rewriting the story a touch so that, in her final moments, their daughter was brave and faithful rather than the truth that she was terrified and lost? Or the truth that we simply cannot know, but it is a surer bet that Cassie joined her classmates in terror, even if it was beseeching a deaf god to intercede on her behalf. There were plenty of prayers that day for certain, but the only miracles seemed to be that the boys were inept bomb-makers.
It must be hard to carry someone else's legacy.