Geeks (16 page)

These painful testimonials explained more—a lot more—about Littleton than all the vapid media stories about video violence, Goths, game-crazed geeks.

For a writer, there’s nothing more humbling than to be at a loss for words. I can’t possibly do more justice to some of these posts than to let them speak for themselves.

By last night, I had received thousands of e-mails about school. Few remembered it fondly—none, in fact. Some had unbearable memories. Some are still recovering. Many more are still there, suffering every day.

Many of you wrote asking if you could help these kids. Others wondered if there was any way to get the message about their lives out beyond Slashdot, if these stories might reach the mainstream media in some form.

Don’t worry about that. The column and the responses to it ricocheted all over the world, via e-mail, mailing lists, links, even faxes. There were scores of requests to reprint. For any others, and on behalf of Slashdot, be my guest.

On the Net, ideas don’t need to be pushed. They find their own audience and stand or fall of their own weight. Eventually, I will answer each e-mail, and am grateful for them.

Here are more voices from the Hellmouth, from some of its children:

From
rpacker:

Hellmouth has become the Stonewall for us geeks.

It marks the point where we stopped running and hiding and waiting, and stopped and stood our ground. From this point on we make our voices heard.

From
Jennifer in Alabama:

Katz, I just finished reading “More Stories from the Hellmouth,” and it left me speechless. I never knew that so many people experienced the same misery I am going through right now, and I want to thank you for giving them a chance to speak out.

I am currently a senior in high school. In fifteen days I will graduate and leave these prison-gray walls, but I’ll always carry the memories with me.

I’m a Goth/Wiccan in Alabama, and for the crime of wearing black lipstick, a trench coat, and a pentagram, I’ve been a social outcast for four years. In some ways I’ve had it better than many of your respondents: I’m graduating at the top of my class as a National Merit Scholar with a 1600 SAT, a finalist for the Alabama All-State Academic Team and a semifinalist for the Presidential Scholars, among other things. I spent last summer studying at Harvard University, and in September I’ll matriculate at Yale University. I hold these things up as talismans to protect me; all my awards are thin paper shields to keep me safe from the hatred that surrounds me and my friends.

Because I attend a large public high school in a state where football is idolized and jocks are demigods, I’ve had my fair share of abuse. But because I’m a girl and the academic star of my class, many kindhearted teachers have gone out of their way to protect me. I have never been physically shoved around or beaten, but I have had to endure frothy-mouthed harangues from Bible-thumping fanatics, and I have been cursed at, shunned, and mocked openly.

It hurts. I’m so glad that Littleton happened at the end of mysenior year. I wouldn’t be able to endure much more of this. Why do people feel justified in making negative assumptions instead of positive ones? Why do they assume that a kid in a black trench coat must be a psychotic murderer instead of a National Merit Scholar? Isn’t the administration aware that if they continue these repressive policies, all the best students will desert the school faster than rats from a sinking ship?
We
are the ones who earn their state grants;
we
are the ones who make this place a nationally recognized Blue Ribbon School—and
we
are the ones who are being alienated.

The hysteria has gotten so intense here that a Muslim girl was sent home for wearing a black veil over her hair.

And the thing that stings most, to me, is that I’m so helpless to stop the madness. I am a leader, of sorts, among the tiny Goth community in my school, and yet there does not seem to be any effective action I can take. What can I do? I want to speak out, but I have no venue to voice my protest. I’m planning a speech/demonstration at next week’s senior celebration, but that seems such a small and impotent gesture. . . . What I want, more than anything, is a chance to go up and
tell
the school officials of America that they are shooting themselves in the foot here.

Please do that. You speak for us; take our stories and let them know what is happening here.

From
John, age thirty-seven:

What this really means to all my fellow young geeks out there? Endure. It may take a year, or two or five, but we will win. . . . All those preps, jocks, etc., etc., will have their M.R.S. degrees, 2.5 kids, a job at Circuit City as an assistant manager, will be wondering where their life went, when we are coming into full bloom and taking over the world.

From
Peter in Boston:

I am a geek, and very proud of it. I am beaten, spit on, pushed, jeered at. Food is thrown at me while teachers pretend not to see, people trip me. Jocks knock me down in the hallway. They steal my notes, call me a geek and a fag and a freak, tear up my books, have pissed in my locker twice. They cut my shirt and rip it. They wait for me in the boys’ room and beat me up. I have to wait an hour to leave school to make sure they’re gone.

Mostly, I honestly think, this is because I’m smarter than they are, and they hate that.

The really amazing thing is, they are the most popular people in the school, while everybody thinks I’m a freak for being online and playing computer games. The teachers just slobber all over them. Mostly, the other kids laugh, or walk away and pretend not to see it. The whole school cheers when they play sports. Sometimes, I want very much to kill them. Sometimes, I picture how I’d do it. Wouldn’t you? But unlike those guys in Littleton, I never will. I value my own life much more. When I read these messages, I would ask other geeks to try and remember that, no matter what. And get online and make contact.

From
Evan:

I am 24 years old, and a successful professional now, but ten years ago, I was in the Hellmouth. Just wanted to shout some small form of encouragement out to the kids fighting today.

Take your fight for the right to be different to the people with power, and enlist your parents’ help. Remember that if you can get your parents to understand your need to be creative, and nonconformist, because your brain is just plain bigger than the small world of middle and high school, your parents can make a fuss to school boards. But if they won’t listen, go to the school boards yourself. Peacefully, but forcefully, assert your right to be different by speaking out against fear and oppression. Because that’s what it is. It’s all about the fear.

People fear what they don’t understand, and let’s face it, the world of a geek isn’t something most people can understand, if only because it’s a complicated world filled with smart folks. And most people aren’t complicated smart folks. You have
got
to break them of the fear.

You gotta explain that it’s an outlet, like racquetball or bridge. You have to explain it’s not violent, it’s colorful. You want violent? Look at football, look at sports. That’s
real actual
violence, not the simulated, stylized, far-from-even-looking-real violence of video games or D&D [Dungeons and Dragons]. And for a real kicker, ask them how many geeks are arrested for violent crimes and misdemeanors when compared to popular athletes.

From
a self-described geek mother:

[My] six-year old wonders why he isn’t popular on the block, but does not enjoy racing his bike, or playing soccer. (Soccer is becoming fun.) He also wonders why no one else is reading the books he is. The online community did not exist when I was in high school, but geek culture did. Dungeons & Dragons (the original three-booklet set) and science fiction saved me.

How many scared parents have taken the time to introduce their child to the items that kept them sane in high school? How many high school libraries are even allowed to stock Theodore Sturgeon, or all of Robert Heinlein? Before we go to Net culture, we need to face local culture. How many schools enforce a respect-for-all policy, and enforce it fairly? I know that I have a budding geek, and if I can get him sane through the next thirteen years, there will be another decent adult on this planet.

From
Armadillo:

I thought I had put this behind me but I obviously haven’t. This whole past week has really torn me up inside because 15 years ago, I was one of those kids . . .

I feel like I’m seeing this all through the eyes of a refugee from a war, who by some circumstance is rescued, taken off to a land far from the conflict, far from the danger and death and constant fear and destruction. Years later, after having made some personal peace with the past, if not the people, they hear or see a report that their former hometown or village has been bombed and the people they knew killed and it all comes flooding back.

Why is it that we as geeks, freaks, nerds, dorks, dweebs . . . have to suffer while the clueless, bow-headed, testosterone-poisoned “normal” people are allowed to get away with murder? . . . I wonder just how many outcasts have been driven to suicide because of just one too many tauntings or practical jokes on a particular afternoon?

Why do we murder the spirits of our most gifted and talented young people? . . .

The e-mail was only growing, and I was lagging behind in answering it. More reporters were calling. My friend Jeff said he was going to pull my computer plug out of the wall if I didn’t bring this mission to a conclusion.

Jesse agreed. “You’ve got to stop now, Jon,” he said, the concern in his voice surprising. He almost never called me “Jon.” He rarely called me anything, but when he had to, “Katz” was the preferred form of address. “If you don’t stop, you’re going to become their leader instead of a writer writing about them. It will take you over. You can’t imagine how much of this is out there. Don’t take it all on. Stop now.”

When it came to pain, anger, and alienation, Jesse was a leading expert, a hundred times smarter and more experienced than most of the bozos parading across cable talk shows yammering on about the dangers of video games. Why didn’t kids like Jesse ever get to go on TV?

Yet scores of them had managed, in the past week, to reach the ears of journalists, to take their firsthand reports to the public. And I didn’t want to be a social worker, or the King of the Geeks. I e-mailed Rob at Slashdot and told him I wanted to write a final column. Relieved, he collected all the columns and posted them on Slashdot’s archives, where they remain at slashdot.org.

They have worked their way through the labyrinthine links of the Internet and the Web to schools, clubs, websites, chat rooms, and lists, and into the computers of thousands of geeks, for whom Littleton was, on many levels, an all-too-relevant and meaningful experience. It was a piece of the geek story—Jesse’s story—but only a piece. I still hear from anguished kids, but far less often; coming in a smaller stream, their stories are both more manageable and less painful.

Yet they affect me, deeply and viscerally; I suspect they always will.

THE PRICE OF BEING DIFFERENT

JOAN McDONALD
has been a teacher in a New York State suburban public high school for nearly three decades. “While deeply saddened by the tragedy in Littleton,” she wrote Tuesday, “I am appalled at the resulting backlash our students are forced to suffer.”

The last thing we need in the twentieth century, she wrote, is another witch-hunt. But that’s what we’re getting. McDonald described what hundreds of other teachers, administrators, and students have been reporting all week—an assault on speech, dress, behavior, or values that the media, politicians, and some educators deem uncomfortably different a/k/a geek, nerd, Goth, the usual labels.

In a Gallup poll this week, 82 percent of Americans surveyed said the Internet was at least partly to blame for the Colorado killings. And schools across the country were banning trench coats, backpacks, black clothing, white makeup, Goth music, computer gaming shirts and symbols. They installed hotlines and “concern” boxes for anonymous “tips” about the behavior of nonmainstream students. Kids who talked openly about anger and alienation, or who confessed thoughts of revenge or fantasies of violence against people who’d been tormenting and excluding them, were hauled off to counselors.

Thus the students already at risk, already suffering, have become suspects, linked in various thoughtless ways to mass murder and—consequently—more alienated than before.

“I just came right now from the counselor’s office,” e-mailed DrgnD. “I scored a thousand. I had on a long coat, was wearing black and loudly told the jerk sitting next to me that I’d do my best to kill him if he ever called me ‘a trenchcoat freak’ again. I am now officially on probation. He is not.”

Among the many other consequences of the Columbine High School tragedy: The cost of being different just went up.

Take the Goths, one of the distinct subcultures singled out by the press and linked to the Littleton bloodbath.

One of the most individualistic, interesting, and yes, gloomy subcultures, Goth is a style—of music, dress, state of mind. In general, Goths wear black, hang out on the Net, experiment with androgynous looks, are sometimes drawn to piercings and tattoos with white makeup, and love Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, and the Cure. Among their cherished authors are Sartre, Burroughs, Shelley, and Poe. Fascinated with death (a taboo in the media and certainly in schools, along with sex and the open discussion of religion), Goths see it as a part of life.

In general, though, Goths do not hurt people. They brood; they emote; but the idea that they are murderous is a cultural libel.

One of the educational system’s pervasive responses to Littleton was to lecture oddballs and geeks about the importance of not slaughtering others. They hardly need such patronizing, offensive lessons about not committing massacres. They’re probably one of the least likely cultures in American life to commit homicide; their weapons of choice are electronic flames, not machine guns.