When murderers casually stroll the halls of a High School, our sympathies are often scattered. Our hearts tend to go out to the victims who have been killed or maimed and their families. We ache for the community whose sense of security and well being has been badly shaken, possibly for years to come, and we mourn for ourselves. We constantly ask "why do things like this keep happening?" Whenever one of these real-life horror stories happen, we feel sorry for ourselves almost as much as we feel sorry for those directly affected, because we know, in our heart of hearts, that those who were killed could just as easily have been people that we love, or ourselves.
When the murderers strike so heartlessly against others, there are people who usually escape our sympathies while getting a full blast of our resentment. The family of the murderers. There is an impulse to lay the blame at the feet of the people closest to the killers. It's an understandable reaction, particularly if the killers have ended their own lives, and are not alive to face the consequences of society. Those consequences are often delivered to their families and they serve as punching-bags by proxy. When a community is so deeply wounded, the impulse many people have is that somebody has to pay. And since school shooters are usually wayward youths, the most direct recipients of vitriol from the citizenry are the parents. They raised the monster, so they had to know what was happening, right?
Sue Klebold, mother of Columbine Murderer Dylan Klebold, (I am usually against sharing the names of mass killers, but I think in the case of the Columbine murderers, the proverbial cat is out of the bag at this point, and it would be impossible to not share it here.) has a different point of view to share. She had no inkling that her son was up to anything sinister. From her point of view, her son was the same person he had always been leading up to April 20th, 1999. He was irritable, and could get annoyed, but by and large he was the same loving person she always knew.
Once the murders happened, she would spend years trying to make amends with the families of the victims and try desperately to reconcile the gentle-hearted, kind son she had known with the blood thirsty killer who had helped snuff out thirteen innocent lives, before turning his gun on himself.
It is a tale of a raw grief so intense that Sue and her husband, Tom would often wish for death. Not only did they have to mourn the son they had lost, and the people he had killed, but the community who had opened their arms to the victims of the families, turned a cold shoulder to the Klebold family. Sue doesn't resent Littleton for their snub; she would have been enraged if the tables had been turned on her son. But it didn't make her grief any easier.
The book is ultimately many things; It's a heartfelt apology to the people affected by Dylan's crimes. She makes it clear that she had no idea what was happening, and had she the opportunity to trade her life for the victims of Columbine, she would gladly take it. She can not turn back time, so the best she can do is try to make amends for something which can never be fully resolved.
It is a brutal exercise in hind-sight. Sue pores through her recollections of the last years of her son equipped with both the knowledge of the murders and information she has gleaned from the many mental health (she calls it "brain health") experts she has spoken to and cited in the book. Previous innocuous-seeming events are given a frightening new significance. Klebold goes through great lengths to explain how she perceived things when they were happening, so we understand why she didn't try to stop her son; She just didn't know. She readily admits that she believes had she interpreted the events and things Dylan had said in the actual context that they were happening, and not through her own point of view, she could have prevented the massacre from happening. And that is something she lives with every day of her life.
The book is also a road-map. How she went from a pariah who wished for death to someone willing to step forward in society, wanting to live again. It's like an inversion of His Name Is Ron, but instead of an innocent victim, it is about a killer. She hates what her son did, but loves him nonetheless. A balance she thought she may never have been able to master without an accrued understanding of what happened at Columbine and inside of her son's mind. If you want to see a mass murder from a perspective we almost never hear from, I suggest this book. Sue Klebold will buy your sympathy and it is richly deserved. A fascinating book, worth the read. A.
No comments:
Post a Comment