On Columbine (And A Bit About Debate)

Yes, the massacre.
It hits home for me because I live about 45 minutes away from the actual Columbine High School and have met and talked to survivors of the incident. I've been inside the school, there was a debate tournament there last year. It was very clean and new-looking, really big too, but walking through the halls, cafeteria, and atrium where the library once stood was still haunting as fuck.

As y'all know, I'm a debate kid. I'm on my school's team (which is an NFL team, not Festival, for those who know/care) and one of the events I compete in aside from actual debate is called Dramatic Interpretation. Basically, it's a single-person event where you present a 10-minute dramatic piece and then get scored based on how good or bad you are at acting. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm kind of beastly at it.

The better pieces you see in Dramatic Interpretation are usually depressing, intense, and/or emotionally hard-hitting. Last year, my piece was about Christopher Spry, a British kid who was severely abused my his insane foster mother, just to give you an idea of the usual subject matter. The way I presented it was pretty graphic, but I always did really well.

Anyway, this year, my piece is a little less in-your-face and a little more emotionally layered. I'm doing a cutting from an essay written by the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine killers, about the actions taken by her son and his best friend on that horrific Tuesday morning.

You can read that here

In preparing for the new debate season, which starts in about a month, I've begun blocking and memorizing my piece. Also, for the first time ever, I decided to do a little research into the back round of my piece.

See, I already know more about the Columbine Shooting than most people do simply because of my proximity to 'ground zero', but after a few hours of watching pirated documentaries, unreleased tapes, reading original journal entries, and looking at really gruesome shit on Google Images, I've got a newly informed perspective on what I'm going to be talking about all year.

In all honesty, I think that the attack was a monstrosity of epic proportions. It is my opinion that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were severely fucked up kids, however, they could have been easily stopped. Although my drama piece for this year is basically justifying the inaction of the parents, I really think that if they had understood their children better, they would have been able to get their kids some help, or at least have them institutionalized.

What's really scary are those mental lists that you can't help but instantly make of the people that you personally know that could possibly be capable of doing something like that again. The social hierarchies are so fucked up at my school, I could definitely see something like Columbine playing out at some point before I graduate.

The problem is that people my age are so unrelentingly judgmental and cruel simply because they can be. I know I'm guilty; I'm not generally a nice person anyway, but put my next to someone I actually dislike and I'll show you a new meaning of the word 'venom'. I can make people break easily and without remorse, and I don't know why I do it, sometimes it just happens. And everyone does that sometimes; makes that one cutting remark that they know they shouldn't but do anyway just to see the reaction.

I suppose it's human nature to enjoy seeing other things in pain, but it's also human nature to know that causing that sort of pain is wrong. When your own pain or insanity overrides that part of your humanity, you lose that sense of 'wrong' and can no longer contain yourself. I'm not at that point, and am resilient enough to never get there, but I definitely know people who could be inches away from that point, or, for all I know, already there.

It's jarring to look at the documentation of a massacre and realize how easily it could happen again. I mean, it has, but never to the extent of what Columbine was.

After all of this, I'm going to go into every Interpretation round with an intricately-layered emotional base that will be completely genuine. Yes, all of this research and thinking was initially to build a character, but now I've built a little more on myself.

I don't know if, when performing and competing, I'll be able to keep the emotions of my character and my own emotions separate. I feel like even now, they're beginning to bleed into each other.

It's going to be an interesting season.
Julia