Warning Signs.
Personally I wouldn’t vote you Most Likely to Blow Up the School. That vote already went to (NAME DELETED)! Nearly three-forths of the G-view High Tennis team and most of my friends agree that if anyone were to blow up the school or ever do anything remotely like the Littleton, CO incident it would be (NAME DELETED) and not you.
That was posted on my website’s guestbook… actually after the final day of my last day of school. I deleted the name because I didn’t want to cast any suspicions anywhere. The comment, I must admit, is completely insane, and lead me to the response “What is that? The new category in the yearbook alongside “Most Likely to Succeed”??“. (It does take us back to how odd conversations that went on during that time at my high school, and likely across the nation.)
You want some relationship between (NAME DELETED) and I? Well… (NAME DELETED), I, and a girl I’ll call “Adele” (not her name) sat together in Junior year English class, and generally annoyed the teacher. The conversations went along the lines of — the feasibility of getting rid of our Republican System of Government — the Legislative and the Executive branches in particular — and Replacing it with Direct Democracy. Government would have to be de-centralized to a point where it might start to resemble something like the “Blade Runner” movie (which worked well for (NAME DELETED), but not so much for my perception of America), and, I pointed out, the fact that the only way we can get such a system working at the moment was through Internet Technology would tend to disenfranchise the poorer classes, and you’d already expressed a Marxist concern for the Proleteriat, so…
It was a discussion on how one can topple the Chinese Government that led the teacher to say, “Who are you? Pinky and the Brain.”
I’m not sure whether I was a bad influence on him, or he was a bad influence on me, and to what degree we were both bad influences on Adelle (though suredly I was somewhat a good influence on her), but The teacher shortly separated the three of us, to the point where whenever he counted out for random groups of 3 students to work together — we’d invariably be reunited. (I received Detention here once due to disruption of class.)
Those, my friend, are Misty Water Colored Memories… of the way… we were.
The day after Columbine, though, at a moment when (Name Deleted) was alone with me — at the end of lunch in the library or something — he asked me, “You know, if you ever need help committing a school shooting…” I gave him a dead serious face, and told him to shut the up. I half-considered contacting the police or a guidance counselor or the principal, not because I thought he was serious (he wasn’t), but to give him a good smacking for a lousy sense of taste. Never mind, his name itched itself often in class conversations through the day (along with a couple of genuine “goth” kids)… I wasn’t going to be the one casting aspersions his way.
Weeks later, someone else pulls me aside, and asks me a question that was evidentally on his mind (likely after putting together a jigsaw puzzle with him): “If he went to Columbine, do you think [NAME DELETED] would’ve be a member of the ‘Trenchcoat Mafia’?” My answer: “Well… in a weird way, he’s fairly popular, and…” “Yes, but I’m thinking at a bigger school…”
Curious items to chew on, and my conclusion was fairly short in coming that The “Trenchcoat Mafia” were innocent, except for two sociopaths, so it’s a meaningless question anyway.
I link to a Minnesotan for any real consideration, as on this blog I’ve been going back and forth between Terri Schiavo and this school shooting (though mostly through hangling over what exactly it is– the “Libertarian National Socialist Green Party.”)