The Outsiders

A minor casualty of the 1999 Columbine tragedy was a coming-of-age novel I had recently finished. The story included a fictionalized school shooting loosely based on one in Moses Lake, WA, some five or six years ago. In what I believe to be the granddaddy of these modern shootings, a 14-year-old boy named Barry Loukitis walked into his afternoon math class, wearing boots, a cowboy hat, and a long-rider's coat, which concealed a rifle and two pistols. He first shot and killed the boy he considered his major tormentor, the teacher, another classmate, and wounded at least one other student. He then demanded that everyone line up in the back of the room; his intent, to shoot them one by one.

A teacher/coach was able to get into the room, and after a truly terrifying exchange that could easily have ended his life, captured the gun to end the carnage. Subsequent news accounts recorded quick calls for forgiveness of the gunman juxtaposed with cries for an adult trial: responses that became familiar in the following months and years as we watched footage from Pearl, MS, Paduka, KY, Jonesboro, AR, Springfield, OR, and points beyond. At the time I began writing my novel, however, none of those towns was famous in that Barry Loukitis way. I believed I was writing about an anomaly, the kind of event that would allow me to highlight the humiliation and rage many outsiders feel. But as each new shooting occurred, I read more newspaper accounts of the culprits' backgrounds—along with accounts of community, school, and legal responses—looking for new truths that could make my story authentic. Let me say, it is not helpful to my process of writing fiction to check my material daily with CNN.

I took more time to finish the novel than I anticipated, but finally got it in the mail about two weeks before I was to make a presentation to the Texas Library Association. I arrived in Dallas, took a cab to my hotel, unpacked my clothes, and flipped on the television set, only to be astonished with the rest of the nation by the now familiar images of students hurrying out of Columbine with their hands on their heads, past the police and SWAT teams. When I recovered from the initial shock, the obvious became just that, and I called Susan Hirschman, then my editor at Greenwillow Books. She said, "We've been waiting for your call." I asked if my manuscript was on her desk and she said yes.

"Is your garbage can next to your desk?"

She said yes, and I said, "Do it."

She said, "Thank you."

There was no way that novel could have been published without being seen as exploitative, no way my intent would break through. Absent that, Columbine still reduced the events in my story to a footnote, our collective consciousness regarding guns in schools forever changed.

Even with several years' work down the drain, my financial future was not threatened because I could have brought my very-part-time, private child and family therapy practice to full speed in less than a week. Every student who wore a long, dark coat or employed forefinger and thumb to mimic a barrel and hammer or used "Columbine" as a verb was suddenly suspect, often suspended, and in many instances required to take a psychological examination in order to re-enter school. Had the ACLU been listed on the New York Stock Exchange, I'd have mortgaged my house to buy every share I could get my hands on. Schools didn't even know what they wanted evaluated. They were asking the psychological community to do the impossible, to tell them which students were likely to come to school with guns a-blazing.

While I understand the panicky reaction we had as a culture to the rash of shootings—it was a smaller version of the kind of thinking that led us to put Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps during World War II—it couldn't have been less helpful. If these shootings have taught us anything, it is the value of belonging and, conversely, the damage of isolation. With the exception of the few who have turned out to be clinically mentally ill, the shooters have mostly been kids who existed on the outside, who felt profoundly uncared for. They were, in their own perceptions, teased, dismissed, humiliated. Far too often, our tendency as adults is to be dismissive: "If you're feeling bad, you need to tell someone," we say, or "You don't have to be on the outside, there are things you can do to be more popular." Then, we tend to become frustrated and irritated when they don't follow our simplistic advice. What we often fail to understand in teens is something we often fail to understand in ourselves: that when any human drops below a certain level of self-worth, nothing matters. Sometimes the personal response to that sense of worthlessness is, "Woe be unto somebody when I don't care anymore." I read a quote in a weekly newsmagazine from a man on death row not long after the Columbine incident. His quote ought to be a bumper sticker. He said, "I'd rather be wanted for murder than not be wanted at all."

I visit the adolescent literature classes at a local university one time per quarter to talk about my books and about the troubled kids I sometimes write about. I make myself available for those presentations because I am constantly struck, as I sit across my office from some teenager telling his horror story, that this kid is in a class in a school somewhere in town, dealing with the things he's telling me—at the same time a teacher is trying to help him learn math or English or social studies, and that teacher can't have a clue that maybe her kindness or attention is creating such anxiety that the student will be compelled to respond negatively to it. The student knows one thing about kindness, or any other "good thing" happening in his life. He knows, from experience, that it turns bad. And while he can't control that "truth," he can control when, and when the anxiety becomes intolerable, he takes control, often blowing up. So, a teacher who has been doing her best to make sure the student experiences her kindness, and the safety of her classroom, may become frustrated and irritated that her best efforts are not well received, and the struggle begins. The classroom becomes "not safe" for the student, becomes one more errant example of how the world turns on him, and another layer of self-contempt is laid down.

I described that basic self-destructive process to a class of college students within six months of graduating and taking over classrooms of their own. A young man said he'd been instructed regularly in his education courses to get control of his classes with an iron hand, then relax later as conditions allowed. He asked me if that was "wrong."

I said, "God, are they still saying that? I heard it first in 1964; walked into my first classroom in 1970 and discovered I didn't have an iron fist, and immediately considered myself a failure, as if I weren't cut out for teaching." While there is still some question regarding whether or not I was cut out for teaching (ask any student who took geography from me), that wasn't the reason. I went on to tell this student something else I believe to be true: that there is little in good teaching that doesn't hinge on relationship, and that taking time to establish structure while also inviting dialogue replaces the iron fist just fine, thank you. One way to do that is to look at the "structure" of the classroom as something that is made up of boundaries of physical and emotional safety, and of whatever rules one needs to get through the business of the day, which of course is education. Within that structure is where the relationship takes place.

Someone at a teacher's conference recently asked why I didn't take time to write a nonfiction book about dealing with adolescents. I thought about it briefly and realized I would begin with, "Don't judge and don't take it personally," and that would be pretty much the end of my book. Hard to charge $20 for that. We fail to remember sometimes that adolescence is, first and foremost, a developmental stage, that humans at that age are supposed to be separating, pushing away. The more solid the foundation we give them from which to push away, the better they will be able to trust that foundation, and turn to us when the pushing away gets too scary. At the same time, within that structure we need to begin the business of establishing relationship, which leads to mutual respect. We should be asking a lot of ourselves in this process: to not judge teenagers too harshly as they find their means of expression (because the vast majority really do want to find the pathway to responsible adulthood) and to not take their actions personally (because they aren't personal; the content is not as important as the process).

At the same time, we can learn a great deal from the content if we listen. I was on the periphery of an 11-year-old's work in therapy recently. By coincidence he had lost a classmate in a suicide-homicide that was related to one of these school shootings. I had worked with his mother years ago, when he had been placed in foster care at age four because she had significantly abused and neglected him. In the end, his mother had chosen a man over her son and left him with his grandmother. His grandmother was (and is) a wonderful parent to him, but the loss of his mother remains an aching reminder of what it is not to be wanted—and much of his therapy has focused on his feelings of isolation. The boy is now overweight, has something of a speech impediment, and is picked on by classmates to the extent that he has chosen to be home-schooled.

He said something we all need to hear. He said, "We should have a loneliness building. We should get together a group of kids whose moms left them for drugs or bad guys, and they're lonely. Loneliness Group would be the name of the group. They would find out they all feel the same, then they don't have the feeling they are different.… The group would help people not hurt themselves too much. We should write a book called Lonely People and get money and build a building for lonely kids. Lonely grown-ups need their own building."

He went on to say that lonely kids try to find meaning, but they can't find it. "That's the loneliness that kills," he said. "People tease them and tease them and tease them until you can't take it any more. Then they hurt themselves or maybe other people."

I believe we have the knowledge to make our classrooms and school libraries places where loneliness simply is not allowed. Since the Columbine shootings, we have thrown large sums of money into providing security for our schools, and I have no problem with that. Many schools have also established inclusion activities for the kids who often can't find anything for themselves, which is definitely a step in the right direction. But we have also instituted a rash of zero-tolerance policies, which I do have a problem with, because the last thing we can afford for these kids is zero tolerance.

We should remember that the greatest portion of the disenfranchised kids at Columbine hit the deck, too, when the shooting started, that they were as astonished and traumatized as anyone else was. And we should also remember that in the days following that incident, outsiders all over the country stood up and identified themselves, because they now had a voice (ugly as it sometimes sounded). Instead of inviting those kids in, we tried to identify them and push them further out. Think of the number of times you have heard a parent say that some kid is a "bad influence" and that their child should stay away from him or her. Think of the number of times we have tried to break up groups of "undesirables." What arrogance it is to keep any children from finding a place to be included.

I think in the two years since Columbine, we have learned some valuable lessons, but there are more to learn. If nothing else comes out of all this violence, we need to learn the importance of expression, how important it is for all of us to be heard and included.

At the end of my 11-year-old friend's conversation, he said in a very matter-of-fact, nonthreatening way, "I can see how a kid would come to school with a gun."

I want him to see how a kid wouldn't.