In the late summer of 1998, when our son Eric had just turned five, we dropped him off at kindergarten for the first time, a few blocks from our home. Joyce had struggled with whether sending Eric to a private or a public school. For thirteen years, she’d attended Catholic schools, and she felt that he might get a better education at a private institution, but after researching the best public schools in our neighborhood, we ultimately picked one of them.
We never forgot taking him to kindergarten on that first morning and watching him line up on the sidewalk with the other kids and walk into the school, becoming absorbed into a group of boys and girls his own age. The experience was accompanied by a twinge of something a little unsettling. It wasn’t just a matter of letting go of a measure of control over our child, which was normal and inevitable. But he was also entering a school system and joining a culture that we had little ability to influence. All we could do was hope that it was moving in the right direction, but a lot of evidence suggested otherwise.
One afternoon right after he entered kindergarten, at the height of the television coverage of the Monica Lewinsky/President Clinton sex scandal, we were in the living room with Eric. He was sitting on the floor drawing a picture of an animal.
He stopped and looked up at us.
“I hate the president,” he said.
We glanced at each other and asked him what he meant.
“I hate the president,” he said again.
As a five-year-old in kindergarten, he’d somehow picked up enough of the fallout from the scandal to start aping parts of the adult world, which had regularly been repeating their hatred of Bill Clinton.
We tried to counter what he was saying, but it’s hard to convey the complexities of grown-up reality to a small child. If we could have taught him one thing, it would have been not to hate others, especially for their intimate behaviors, but he was already being shaped by other forces. He didn’t pick up this view of the president from his mother or father because we didn’t talk about hating Bill Clinton. He’d downloaded it from the environment he was growing up in—a media and political environment that was looking for the easy kill.
Eight months later in April 1999, the massacre at Columbine erupted in Denver. It followed some other school shootings—in Mississippi, Arkansas, Oregon, and elsewhere—but Columbine was especially horrific and occurred just a few miles away from where we lived. The reports coming out of the school after the tragedy reflected the larger social environment.
“Everyone hates you,” Brooks Brown, a former student at Columbine, said about the school on Oprah Winfrey’s afternoon TV show. Brown was referring to the cliques that had tormented him and other kids. “The people who made fun of me my whole life are still on top.”
“It was relentless,” Debra Sears told the Rocky Mountain News when describing the bullying at Columbine. In the mid-1990s, Sears had withdrawn her stepsons from the school because of the harassment: “The constant threats walking through the halls. You had a whole legion of people that would tell you that just going to school was unbearable.”
“If you don’t fit in at Columbine,” Paula Reed, a teacher at the high school, told Oprah, “it gives you no options.”
One of the counselors for the Columbine survivors and the victims’ families was Dr. Frank Ochberg, a Michigan psychiatrist specializing in post-traumatic stress. He was brought to the school to help those suffering from nightmares and flashbacks. Referring to the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Dr. Ochberg used a term employed by law enforcement and mental health experts when trying to identify dangerous students or others before they become murderers.
The term is “leakage,” which means that signs of trouble or potential violence can leak out of kids as warning signals in advance of bloodshed. Experts have been trained to be on the lookout for leakage from such individuals. Dr. Ochberg indicated that there may have been some minor examples of leakage from Harris and Klebold before the massacre—signs that, unfortunately, no one in a position of authority had been astute enough to perceive or act on.
What wasn’t focused on following Columbine was the concept of leakage in a whole society or how a bitterly divisive media, hate-saturated websites, violence-filled movies, and the widespread dynamics of demonization could have played a role in the development of these killers. The experts tended to look at the shootings more narrowly, searching for emotional problems or genetic defects or subtle brain dysfunctions that had gone undetected in individuals. They were attempting to pinpoint an organic personal flaw, not a social or cultural one.
According to Dr. Ochberg, Eric Harris was simply the “Mozart of psychopaths, the kind of person who comes along only every two or three hundred years.”
Except that in the next fifteen years, in schools from coast to coast, and in malls and theaters and at other venues, this same “Mozart” kept appearing and reappearing with increasingly frequency—until mass shootings were being called an “epidemic.”
Eric Harris was everywhere.
The difficulty, at least for some parents raising children and especially boys at the end of the 1990s, was that they were confronted with a dilemma that offered up no easy solutions. What they were trying to teach at home and what many young people were absorbing from the political and cultural realms were at striking odds—a gap that only got bigger with the arrival of the new millennium.
In addition to the effects of this surrounding environment, by the late nineties technology and social media were exploding, and no one could predict the impact this would have on the upcoming generation.
Following the shootings in Aurora, Eric looked back on his own formative years from a college perspective.
“Once you enter the school system,” he told us, “the new ‘parent’ of the child is the culture. That includes other kids and their families, teachers, bureaucracy, entertainment, media, etcetera.”
From the beginning in our household, Joyce had been adamant about not allowing Eric to purchase or play games that depicted murder. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t exposed to them.
“The minute you leave home,” he said, “movies and video games become major influences because you’re around other kids who are playing violent games. In ones like Super Smash Brothers, which was made for kids and families to play together, the characters are beating the hell out of each other. There’s no visible blood or pain, but that’s still the object of the game. Everyone was playing it when I was six or so.”
It had taken fifteen years and the tragedy in Aurora before Eric really started talking with us about us how he grew up. He spoke about seemingly small things and things that weren’t so small, things that were foundational to his youth. He filled in some of the gaps from all those times when he was silent.
“When you were young,” he said to us, “the spheres of influence were much less, but technology has changed exponentially. Marketers know how to get young kids hooked on these games at a very early age. Millions of us were playing Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Game Boys, and we were trading cards related to these games. Some young adults I know are still playing them. You can get addicted to this, and it stays with you for the rest of your life, but it isn’t attached to anything real.
“A baseball card, which was something you traded when you were young, was at least attached to something real: baseball itself. This other stuff isn’t, and at age five you become a consumer. As you get older, you want to keep consuming. The games become much more violent and much more graphic, especially as the technology gets better. This was the starting point for a lot of boys my age.”
He talked about making the transition from kindergarten to elementary school to middle school to high school.
“In elementary school,” he said, “everything seems kind of equal with the kids. In middle school, the disparity is more evident. Some people appear to be more ‘special’ because of popularity or wearing the right sports clothing or their parents have a lot of money and status or whatever. In high school, most of us find coping mechanisms. ‘How was school today?’ your parents ask you. ‘All right,’ you say and you don’t say anything else.
“You don’t tell them. You never tell them. You try to protect your parents from what you’re going through. Maybe you tell your friends. But some kids don’t find good friends or good coping mechanisms. I was lucky. I found good friends. We understood why we didn’t hang out with certain people. We understood boundaries.
“The thing about being that age is that it’s all emotional. You can’t talk about it. You just feel it all the time. Nobody teaches you how to deal with these feelings. School doesn’t do that and the culture doesn’t, either. School teaches you algebra, not how to live with your emotions. If your parents don’t help you with this, what else is there? Some kids don’t know how to cope with this.
“The school shooters are the ones who believe that they’re not ‘special.’ There’s something wrong with you. There’s something missing.”