Why did they do it?

Can there be such a thing as an entire country suffering from dyslexia? At the time I'm writing this article, more than three months have passed since the massacre at Columbine High School, the most disturbing event to happen on US soil in years. The murderers wrote their message not only in the deep red of blood, they spelled it out in plain black and white letters. Amazingly, we are still struggling to figure out the reason for the massacre. We are wondering, Was it lack of gun control that made them kill twelve students, a teacher, and themselves, and injure 23 more? Was it violence on TV and movies? Was it hate-mongering web sites, or violent video games? Was it "Goth" clothing and mannerisms? Was it lack of parental supervision, or absence of the Ten Commandments on school walls? Was it insufficient security in school, or too-lenient punishment of offenders? All of these are being held to blame for the actions of Eric Harris, Dylan Klebald, and the other tormented students who have carried out school massacres. Everything is being considered seriously except for the real reason, available for all of us to read, told in the unambiguous words of the Columbine killers.

 

The Columbine tragedy, the most horrible of a series of school massacres within the last two years, has served as a wakeup call that we are suffering from a serious illness that is not going away. The American people are panicking (with good reason) that their local school will be the site of the next massacre. It seems that every governmental body, from local school districts up to the Congress and the President, is working on a solution to the problem of school massacres. However, as the months go by, I see the country coming no closer to understanding and solving the problem. Instead, we are taking useless measures that whittle away the freedoms that our great country is founded upon. We are striving to create a society in which our citizens can have freedom from fear. But fear cannot be legislated away. We are losing the war against fear, and it is freedom that is being sacrificed. A state of national emergency has been unofficially declared and, typical of states of emergency, we are suspending individual rights in the hope of defeating an enemy that we don't comprehend.

 

Almost all of the tangible actions taken by politicians and school administrations thus far have been to increase "Big Brother" tactics: hiring more police officers and security guards; installing sophisticated weapon detection and student surveillance devices; toughening punishments for children who misbehave; mandating children to carry see-through book bags; and instructing teachers and students how to identify and report children at risk for becoming mass murderers. The cherished wall of separation between church and state is being demolished as our government is on the way to approving display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

 

Of course we all want security for our children. Unfortunately, making schools impenetrable to determined snipers and bombers would require conversion into high security penitentiaries surrounded by unbreachable walls and bullet-proof windows. And after spending trillions of dollars on these renovations, what's to stop a crazed student from shooting kids on their way to school, during a fire-alarm, or at a local hangout? Furthermore, who among us wants to have our children educated in a prison environment? As for trying to target children based on characteristics of past murderers, this has spawned a nationwide witch hunt: the American Civil Liberties Union has been avalanched with complaints of innocent students being interrogated, searched, or punished for saying the "wrong" things, wearing the "wrong" clothing, carrying the "wrong" books, drawing the "wrong" pictures, and visiting the "wrong" websites. How, exactly, are such procedures supposed to promote tolerance towards students who are different, and how are they going to reduce the rage of those students who already feel like outcasts?

 

Other more long-range proposals are aimed at the social and emotional factors contributing to massacres. Confusion grows as everyone promotes their own agenda in calling for things like gun control, censorship of the arts and media, increased parental responsibility, stricter discipline of students, fighting child abuse and neglect, instituting uniform school dress codes, and return to religious values. Even the most enlightened of the suggestions, those directed towards counseling troubled students, are vague. For instance, which students are to be counseled, what exactly is their problem, and what interventions will work? After all, Eric Harris had been in therapy for over a year and this didn't stop him from participating in the massacre. Must we implement every suggestion.

 

“The Government statistics are a lie! If you don’t believe there is an epidemic of violence in the country, just look at the cartoons on TV!”

The True Problem

Our country is in such a state of confusion because we are focusing on the wrong problem. We are diagnosing the problem as school massacres. The act of picking up guns and shooting away at schoolmates, teachers, and themselves strikes us as so bizarre, terrifying, and mind-boggling that we can't focus on the broader picture. All we are concerning ourselves with is the massacre part of the story and how to prevent future atrocities. Every facet of the lives of the murderers is being considered as a legitimate contributing factor in the creation of these teenage "monsters." As a result, gun control laws, violence in the media, parental behavior, social morality, Goth clothing -- anything at all that anyone suspects may have contributed in some way to the violence of Eric and Dylan -- have become targets in our efforts to prevent the disease of school massacres.

 

How can we expect to fare in our battle against such a problem? In a May 9th article in the New York Times, Sheryl Goldberg reports the conclusions of national experts on statistics and on crime prevention and detection: there are fifteen million high school students in the country, and it is essentially impossible to apprehend the two or three of them who are are destined to massacre their fellows each year. In other words, all the massive measures being taken throughout the country to stop massacres are probably useless. The article also tells us that, statistically speaking, homicide in school is extremely rare and that schools are actually a very safe environment for kids -- "less that 1 percent of child homicides occur in or around schools." In other words, we're fighting an imaginary dragon. A few isolated, gruesome events have occurred within our vast nation, and we act like violence is rampant in our schools. One of the statements that Ms. Goldberg makes is, "Because such events [school massacres] are so rare, and because it is impossible to eliminate risk from life, there may be no larger lessons to draw, and no way to prevent another one."

 

While that article is packed with valuable though sobering information, I strongly disagree that there are no larger lessons to learn and no way to prevent another massacre. There is, indeed, a larger lesson in Columbine, and there is something that can realistically be done about it.

 

What is the true message of Columbine -- and the other school massacres?

 

To answer this, we need to ask, Why do students spray bullets at their schoolmates? It must be realized that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebald committed premeditated acts of mass murder and suicide. As anyone who ever watched Perry Mason knows, premeditated murders have motives . The decision to kill not only others, but themselves as well, was a very serious one, made with a great deal of pain and deliberation. And they were smart enough to make sure to kill themselves before being caught. Had they remained alive, they would be looking forward to decades of living hell, locked up with other vicious murderers, loathed by an entire world, and tormented by their own feelings of guilt. To plan and carry out such a horrible act, Eric and Dylan, therefore, must have had a very powerful motive for wanting to shoot up their schoolmates.

 

What was that motive? Was it lack of gun control? Did they think, "We are suffering so much because the gun control laws in the country are too lax, and too many people are getting killed. So let's go on a shooting spree and then kill ourselves so that people will want to stop owning guns"? Or, alternatively, "It' so easy to get guns, we have no choice but to use them against our fellow students and ourselves"?

 

Was their motive violence in the media? Did they think, "Killing looks like so much fun on the screen, let's do it in real life and commit suicide afterwards"?

 

Was their motive lack of parental supervision? Did they think, "Our parents don't supervise our activities enough, so let's go on an orgy of murder and suicide"?

 

Was it lack of school security? Did they think, "It's so easy to bring guns into school, so let's use them on others and on ourselves"?

 

Was their motive lack of exposure to religion? Did they think, "We don't go to church enough, so we're compelled to murder students, teachers, and ourselves"?

 

Was the motive Goth subculture? Did they think, "We're Goth, so let's end the lives of a whole bunch of people including ourselves"?

 

Excuse me if these statements sound ridiculous, but it truly is absurd to attribute the massacres to these types of factors that our nation is currently targeting.

 

What, then, is the real motive behind the Columbine massacre? It was stated clearly and concisely in the e-mail suicide note left by Eric Harris and reported in all the major news media in the country: "Your children, who have ridiculed me, who have chosen not to accept me, who have treated me like I am not worth their time are dead." Even before the Columbine massacre, the picture was clearly emerging from news reports that the student killers were social outcasts and victims of ridicule by peers. Their motive of the killers was very clear and simple: to exact revenge for years of ridicule and rejection, and to make it stop once and for all. When a student plans to massacre his fellows, he is thinking, "You destroyed my life by ridiculing me and rejecting me. Now I am going to destroy your lives!" This is the true reason behind all the massacres! The real message of Columbine is that ridicule and rejection by peers is so painful that it can drive people to ultimate acts of violence! Seeking other motivations for these atrocities can only lead our nation down blind alleys, curtailing our freedoms and wasting valuable resources while children continue to suffer. In the same e-mail note mentioned above, Eric Harris warned against blaming the killing "on the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, or the way I choose to present myself." And he was right! A kid can experience violence on TV and video games all day long, never go to church, have parents who are too busy to keep a constant vigilant eye on him, wear Goth clothing, etc., but he will never pick up a gun to shoot his fellow students as long as he feels respected and accepted by them. Yet, as though we can't read, or as though we can't believe that a murderer actually knows his own motivation, we are going ahead and doing precisely what Eric told us not to do.

Columbine High Massacre

The message of Columbine is not just about two tortured souls who went on a shooting spree. The massacres are merely the volcanic eruptions that drew the attention of the national media. If anything of true value is to come out of the student massacres, it should be to raise the problem of victims of teasing to our national consciousness. For every one of the students who gained notoriety for exterminating his fellow students, there are literally a million others whose suffering is never reported by the media. Almost every classroom in every school has two or three students who live in hell because they are teased and ridiculed by their schoolmates. They often get into verbal and physical altercations with their tormentors, and comprise the majority of those students who are regular visitors to the principal's office. They are social pariahs, avoided by other children who are too embarrassed to be seen associating with such "losers". They are convinced that their peers hate them and that there must be something terribly wrong with themselves. In class they stew in anger, nervously anticipating the next insult, planning their response, and fantasizing grand scenes of revenge against their tormentors. This makes it hard for them to keep their minds on their studies, and their grades suffer.

 

Hard as the teasing victims try to defeat their enemies, they fail pathetically. Usually they are the ones who end up getting in trouble because their angry reactions to their tormentors are visible to everyone around them. They are almost always the first to throw a punch in a fight, egged on by their intimidators' challenge to "Make me [shut up]!" Attempts to stop their teasers by enlisting the help of school staff are generally fruitless and make their situation worse by earning them reputations as "tattlers." Thus, they come out looking and feeling like fools in confrontation after confrontation.

 

Sometimes parents get personally involved in helping their teased child, either by confronting the teasers and their families, which can result in ugly family feuds. Or they demand that the school help, which is often useless because the school may not know how to stop the problem. A conflict then arises between the parents and the school administration, often ending when the parents move their child to a different school. Of course, the problem has a good chance of reemerging in the new setting.

 

It should be no wonder that teased kids are so attracted to violent video games. Frustrated in their desire for power and revenge in real life, they find some satisfaction through fantasy. The pictures they draw are frequently done in black and red, reflecting their feelings of anger, hatred, depression, and vengeance.

 

In their teenage years, teased kids are likely to have great difficulty succeeding with the opposite sex because they cannot imagine that anyone could really want them. If they do manage to get a girlfriend or boyfriend, they can be shattered by feelings of rejection when their friend ends the relationship. This is what set off T.J. Solomon, a long-time victim of teasing and the shooter in the latest massacre on May 20th in Georgia: he went on his school shooting spree after his girlfriend broke up with him.

 

Being teased is a major factor in school phobia in the younger grades and truancy in the higher grades. The pain of teasing victims is so great that some of them even attempt suicide to escape their misery. For every teased teen who murders students, there are probably a thousand who take their own lives instead.

 

The suffering of teasing victims does not end when they finish school. They generally grow up to be angry, hurt adults with a variety of social and emotional dysfunctions. They lack self-esteem and are very critical of themselves, can't tolerate being criticized by others. Prisons and mental health facilities are filled with people who have been ridiculed since childhood and could never figure out how to make the ridicule end. If, in your professional life, you provide therapy to adults with emotional difficulties, ask them if they were victims of teasing during their school years. You may be surprised to discover how many of them suffered from this problem.

 

Why is it so painful to be teased, ridiculed, and rejected? Because humans are social creatures. In order to be happy, we need to feel accepted by our social groups. When close-knit, traditional societies used ostracism as punishment, this often amounted to a death sentence. Not having any social contacts, the isolated person would quickly give up the will and effort to live. Acceptance by the social group is even more important to us than acceptance by family members. The place where people typically receive the least respect is right in their own homes. Most of us have gotten used to being yelled at, put down, or rejected by our parents, siblings, spouses, and children, and come to accept it matter-of-factly. In the outside world, though, people are much more respectful towards each other. A harsh word from a friend, colleague, or boss can leave us depressed for days. Children, too, expect to be treated with respect in the outside world, and when they don't get that respect, they are miserable. For a child who feels ridiculed and rejected by his peers, words of praise by parents provide meager comfort. A child who is put down by his family members but is socially successful is going to be much more self-confident than a child who is praised by family but rejected by his social group.

Bullying and Teasing

Unfortunately, teasing is not generally recognized by schools as the devastating problem that it really is, despite the fact that it is the cause of almost all fights between students. Teasing is usually considered a routine disciplinary problem that requires either punishment of the teaser or a superficial ritual of "kiss and make up." Such procedures rarely put an end to the teasing. Punishing the teasers, in particular, always exacerbates the problem: the gratified victims feel encouraged to continue to try to get their teasers in trouble, and the punished teaser looks to get back at his victim for getting him in trouble. In recent years, it has become popular to refer teasers and their victims for peer mediation programs that teach conflict-resolution and negotiation skills. While such activities can have great benefits in many situations, if you think about it, what exactly is there to negotiate when someone calls you an idiot, a fatso, or a nerd? Do you achieve a compromise and agree that you are only half an idiot, fatso, or nerd, or perhaps that you are both idiots, fatsos, or nerds? In fact, such peer mediation programs can be counterproductive. The US News and World Report of 4.6.99 reported that, "According to a study of a large peer-group-counseling effort in the Chicago public schools, the program was 'preponderantly harmful' and may actually have caused more delinquent behavior by putting troubled kids in increased contact with one another."

 

It is my impression that most counselors and therapists do not tackle teasing as a problem in its own right because they think it is a symptom of a larger emotional problem requiring counseling or therapy. However, to regard teasing as as a symptom of emotional difficulty is neither correct nor helpful. Being ridiculed by peers causes emotional suffering, and does so very powerfully. Imagine what would happen to you if your colleagues got together and decided to make fun of you day after day. It wouldn't take long before you become an emotional wreck! No amount of psychoanalysis or professional ego-boosting will do the teasing victim any good as long as his peers continue to ridicule him and treat him like an outcast. The suffering never ends unless the therapy also teaches the victim how to make the teasing stop. I have met victims of teasing who spent years in therapy, during which they may even have attempted suicide, yet were never taught how to stop people from making fun of them.

The Dynamics of Teasing

The dynamics of teasing are very simple, and well understood by psychologists who deal with victims of teasing. It is caused by a simple mistake. This is how it works. The teasers taunt the victims, and the victims, instead of ignoring the teasing, become angry and try to stop it. The victims, by becoming angry over the silly insults, are the losers in this interchange, and look and feel like fools. The teasers are the winners and have a ball at the victims' expense. The victims think they are stopping their tormentors, because that is what they are trying to do. What they cannot see is that they are actually causing the teasers to continue abusing them. The more upset the victims become, and the harder they try to stop the teasers, the more fun the teasers have. And the teasers look forward to the next opportunity to repeat this pleasure.

 

Though it is generally a mistake to do so, it is natural for someone to feel upset by ridicule, and almost anyone can fall into the trap of getting mad and trying to actively stop teasers. That is why teasing victims are found among all groups of people, regardless of intelligence, race, religion, or socioeconomic standing. That is also why the students who slaughtered their peers came from typical American homes, confounding the expectations of analysts to find environments that breed student mass-murderers. Everyone also has the potential for enjoying teasing others (I demonstrate this every time I perform my "game" for treating teasing victims), and teasers, therefore, are also regular kids from every type of background. Unfortunately, this means that what happened in Columbine can happen anywhere.

The Missing Element

Teasing is a confusing issue for modern man. Most of us don't really understand it, nor do we know how to deal with it other than by condemning it, and it's getting worse as time goes by. The reason for our difficulty in understanding teasing is that it is part of a major human drive that is almost entirely ignored by all branches of study of human behavior, whether it's psychology, sociology, religion, or education. This drive is unique to human beings. It is a drive that we almost constantly seek to satisfy, engage in it more than in sex and violence (the two major drives that are studied by psychology) combined, and is absolutely essential for human health, happiness, and resilience.

 

What is this drive? It is the need for laughter! We are all familiar with the saying, made famous by Readers Digest, that Laugher is the Best Medicine. In fact, scientific research has proven that the body actually produces healing chemicals when we laugh. Recent chart-busting movies like Patch Adams and Life Is Beautiful showed how humor enables people to heal from illness and to face up to life's most horrible conditions (though these movies haven't really taught us anything that we haven't already known for millennia). We all love speakers who make us laugh, and children's most beloved teachers are those with a sense of humor. The most widely read sections of newspapers and magazines are the comics and humor pages. The average person is addicted to watching a couple of hours of comedy on TV every day. The "life of the party" is the person who is able to keep everyone laughing. Wood Allen's witticism that "Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing" makes us aware that laughter is on par with the life's ultimate pleasure.

 

One of the things that differentiates homo sapiens from the other animals is our ability to laugh. While some intelligent primates, like chimpanzees and orangutans, show some laughing behavior, none of them laugh as deeply and as frequently as we do. Laughter is a universal human phenomenon, and children the world over begin laughing at a very early age. It is not a learned behavior -- it emerges spontaneously in all of us, and we find ourselves laughing against our will when something strikes us as funny. Human beings have been probably been laughing for hundreds of thousands of years, and the drive to laugh has become solidly embedded in our genes. A human being who does not have the capacity to laugh is probably autistic, or has some other serious mental disorder.

 

Isn't it amazing, then, that laughter and humor are almost ignored in academic study of human beings? You can look at textbook after textbook, and you will probably find nothing on humor and laughter. Chances are that if they mention the word humor, it means one of the bodily fluids that scientists once believed determined personality. There are, in fact, some psychological writings that deal with humor, but they are considered to be minor areas and are not included in the curriculum of psychological study.

 

But it's not only the academic world that's ignorant about laughter. Almost every one of us is ignorant about the nature of the laughter that we are doing every day. All of us will probably agree that laughter is a very important and wonderful part of human existence -- you might even feel that life without laughter is life not worth living! But have you ever bothered to examine what it is that makes us laugh? Do we ever laugh at images of courage, wisdom, honor, generosity, achievement, or good fortune? Of course not! We don't laugh when people look good. We only laugh when people look stupid or miserable! Just try to find a joke that doesn't make fun of anyone! And the more the ridiculous the people look, the harder we laugh.

 

In other words, since laughter is so good for us, it must be good for us to make fun of people! But this is where we come into a bind. Modern society teaches us, from the time we are little children, that it is bad for us to make fun of people! Parents begin punishing their children as soon as they can talk for calling their brothers and sisters bad names, even though they clearly delight in doing this to each other (at least until they start getting punished for it)! This teaching is then forcibly continued in school. Our healthy instincts tell us that we should make fun of each other, but our morality tells us that we shouldn't do it. We must deny our basic instincts. This is a real recipe for neurosis! No wonder we are confused about teasing!

 

Nevertheless, hard as society may try, it cannot legislate away the need for people to laugh at each other. Despite the years that society trains us not to make fun of each other, it only succeeds partially. By adulthood, we have more-or-less learned not to make fun of others to their face, but we spend a good portion of our social time laughing at people who aren't present. And it's also why this same society provides us with round- the-clock comedy: so that we can indulge in our need for laughter by voyeuristically watching highly paid professional actors making each other look like idiots. However, unlike sex and violence, comedy has no rating system. Children of all ages are freely permitted to watch people being made to look like idiots (as long as it contains no sex or violence). And we never even make the connection that the humor we are watching is something that we consider to be immoral in real life!

 

The confusion we have about teasing is not an inevitable part of human life. It is only a result of our "civilized" culture. Perhaps the best way to discover true human nature is to examine human groups that have not become civilized. An excellent example is the Pygmies, who (at least until recent years) have lived for eons like our prehistoric ancestors, in totally self-sufficient tribal groups, under the canopy of the forest. In his classic book on Pygmies, The Forest People, anthropologist Collin Turnbull says, "The BaMbuti [Pygmies] are good-natured people with an irresistible sense of humor; they are always making jokes about one another, and even about themselves..." You will also find this freedom in teasing one another in all primitive peoples. This is our true human nature, and it is not a bad thing. The repression of our natural desire to laugh at each other has not made us better people, and it has not made us happier.

 

It is time that society realized that teasing is a biologically ordained instinct that we all enjoy. And we should realize that children who tease others are not any more evil than you and I. Nor, for that matter, are victims of teasing any less evil than their teasers. After all, it is not the popular macho jock types who have been committing massacres: it is their rejected and dejected victims who metamorphose into murderous monsters.

 

The Solution

Since Columbine, the country has been stepping up efforts to teach teasers to stop teasing. Programs to teach tolerance are proliferating. However, we are forgetting that these massacres have been happening precisely in a place and time in which the organized teaching of tolerance is unprecedented in the history of the world. The problem behind the massacres is not really that kids are not tolerating each others' differences. The real problem is that the teasing victims have not been able to tolerate the teasing, and went berserk! When we emphasize the message that "teasing is a bad thing that hurts people's feelings," we are doing children a disservice. It increases the likelihood that they will get upset when teased! This is exactly the wrong message they should be getting. We need to go back to teaching "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me."

 

We want our children to grow up being resilient. How can they be resilient when we treat them like glass, as though they can be broken by mere words. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebald were not resilient. They were brittle, and they shattered when they couldn't take the insults anymore -- insults they had been unwittingly inviting upon themselves by believing that insults hurt feelings. And this is the problem with all the student murderers: society impaired their natural sense of humor so that they couldn't take a joke about themselves. The solution is not to punish the rest of us by forcing us to live a humorless life. No one is going to be better off when we stifle our laughter. We aren't going to make the teasing victims healthier by making ourselves sicker. The sign of a healthy person is not that he demands that everyone treat him as though he is perfect and fights anyone who challenges that illusion. A healthy person knows that he is not perfect, and is able to laugh at himself and to tolerate others laughing at him. If you called me names, and I got mad, the problem is not that you called me names; the problem is that I got mad. To make the teasing victims healthy, we need to teach them to stop taking themselves so seriously --to laugh about life so they can enjoy living again.

 

It is not just the teasing victims who need to lighten up. Society as a whole can use some lightening up. We have gone so far in trying to legislate protection from abuse that we are losing the ability to laugh at ourselves and each other. The truth is that we would become absolutely miserable if we eradicated teasing from the world. We would be left with a humorless life, a life devoid of laughter, a heavy, serious life. Teasing is not a bad thing -- it is a wonderful thing. If we are smart enough not to let it upset us, it makes us feel great. Teasing is an art that needs to be developed, and it requires intelligence. The person who has mastered the ability to make fun of us cleverly, in a way that makes us laugh, is fun to be with and is greatly loved and appreciated. We are even willing to pay professional comedians for the pleasure of having them make fun of us. Our lives would be much happier if we spent more time learning how to tease and be teased in real life, and spent less time watching the pros do it on TV. But we should also learn an important lesson from the characters on TV comedies. They never go crazy with anger when they are shown to be ridiculous. Like the Pygmies, they simply take it in stride, and so should we.

 

Despite the widespread devastation caused by teasing, it is actually a simple problem to tackle. With an effective approach, the vast majority of teased children can be taught to stop getting mad when teased; this will make the teasing stop in almost no time, sparing them years of needless misery. Identifying the children who are teased is an even simpler task. All you need to do is ask. The kids who get picked on are more than glad to let you know about it. Moreover, the teachers and students all have a good idea who these unfortunate souls are, and so do most of their parents. The entire job of identifying and helping the teased children of America requires little more than some good knowledge; all the personnel that are needed are already on the school payroll. While this approach admittedly cannot guarantee that massacres will never occur again, neither can any other method! However, teaching a victim of teasing how to make the teasing stop in the early grades is the best way to guarantee that that child will never have reason to want to exterminate his schoolmates in the higher grades. Best of all, it will help all those millions of other children who suffer terribly, though they kill no one. All this, while being infinitely cheaper than turning the school system into a police state in order to apprehend two or three murderers before they strike.