NTUAADC: May 2008

I grew up in a rich, white suburb. Whenever I heard about kids going into their high schools and shooting other kids, I felt I understood the anger of the killers. Their towns reminded me of my town. Their high schools reminded me of my high school.

Fathers in my town are mostly successful businessmen and commute to the city to work. The wives do not have many responsibilities. They don’t have jobs and the housework is done by paid help. They fill their days with volunteering and school-related clubs like the Parent-Teacher Committee. They are the typical “soccer moms” of America.
Adults here are constantly talking about and comparing their children. At an early age, children learn that they are being watched not only by their own parents, but also by their friends’ parents. There’s a lot of pressure on kids to excel both in class and on the playing field.

The smartest, most beautiful, and most athletic kids are considered the best. Literally, the blonder the hair, the leaner the figure, the better. Parents pass their belief in these stereotypes on to their children early, and those stereotypes become part of their children’s minds.
Most kids fit the ideal description, so they hung out together in one big clique (called “the preps”). The kids in the clique excluded the kids they labeled “strange” because of their appearance or manner.
As far back as middle school I was considered one of the strange kids, mostly because I wasn’t athletic and was thought unattractive. My friends didn’t fit in either.

There was one big group of friends who always hung out together at school, and I was out of it even though I tried to fit in. At lunch one day in the cafeteria, I saw a girl who was in some of my classes and who I thought liked me. I said hello to her and sat down next to her.
Without saying a word, but with a smile on her face, she picked up her lunch bag and moved one seat away from me. I was humiliated, but I didn’t move to another table.

When I read about school shootings, I understood why some kids started their rampages in the cafeteria. That is where kids who don’t fit in are treated the worst. It’s a place without adult supervision, where kids can pick whom they hang out with and whom they ignore.

In my high school, the large cafeteria (called the Lounge) was split in half. The South Lounge was always packed and almost everyone sat there. The North Lounge was almost empty. It was where the “dorks” and “losers” ate.

It frustrated me that during lunch, my friends would sit in the “Loser Lounge.” They seemed to accept that they were not cool enough.
My freshman year, I still felt desperate to be liked. I had friends, but what I really wanted was to be part of “the group.” I didn’t think I was that different from anybody else. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t chosen to be part of the big clique.

One day, I convinced two friends to come sit with me in the South Lounge with everyone else. We managed to find three empty seats in the crowded, noisy cafeteria and sat down. My friends and I tried to relax, but I could read in their eyes that they felt foolish and uncomfortable. No one spoke to us.

At one point I saw one girl nearby mouth to the girl next to me, “Why are they here?” The girl next to me shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes, and the first girl started laughing.
This really upset me because both of these girls had been good friends of mine when we were young. I had never done anything to make them stop liking me.
After that, I gave up trying to join the group.

Eventually, I was able to ignore the preppies, and my friends and I made our own space separate from them. I guess I realized that if they didn’t need me, I didn’t need them. I didn’t even like a lot of them that much. I had my own friends.

I WAS
By sophomore year, my group had expanded to include about 30 people from all grades, known as the “pitters.” A pitter was someone who hung out in “the pit,” an area by the parking lot behind the school, next to some trees.

It was called the pit because it was the lowest point on the school grounds. But it was also a reference to our status in the school.
The pit was a place to get away from all the preps and others who thought we were no good. It was the only place where we felt in control. The preps took over the lounge, the parking lots, and the school in general. But no preppies came out to the pit.
The fact that the pit kids began smoking a lot earlier than the preppies gave us an image as the “bad kids.” This label wasn’t true, but it stuck to us all through high school.
Though we resented being labeled, we also liked our image. We liked the power of knowing someone was scared of us. We felt that the preps had
been stepping on us for so long; it was time for them to feel small by being scared of us for a change.

I hung out with the “bad kids” in the pit, but I didn’t smoke. I was an honors student and I was respected by my teachers. I was proud to be a pitter, though, and I think my presence there helped to reverse some of the stereotypes that pitters are the kind of people who don’t get anywhere in life.

And the preps weren’t so perfect, either. Many cheated on tests and started smoking. Junior year, rumors began to fly about their wild parties. They would drink heavily and get high on the weekends, and their parties were hook-up fests.
The strange thing was, they seemed proud of that, because they’d talk loudly in class about their sexual exploits. I heard banter kids say things like, “Hey Doug, do you remember when we slept together sophomore year to get experience?” Or the head cheerleader saying to her friend in the middle of class, “Yeah, it was Alex’s first time, so the sex was kind of lame, you know?” I guess having sex was a status symbol to them.
But they were still seen by everyone in town and in school as the good kids, the golden children, the kids who could do no wrong, even though they did.

The parents of kids who’ve done school shootings get a lot of criticism because they didn’t know their kids were so troubled. But in my town, too, all the parents turned a blind eye to their kids’ behavior.
So did the teachers and the police, who would smile proudly at the good kids while the pitters were considered lowlifes.
I’m not trying to say that all the preppies were bad people. But the preps’ behavior was offensive to me because they were always seen as perfect students, athletes, and kids—when they were not. And we were seen as the bad kids, the outcasts.
In truth, we formed our own clique only because we were rejected by everyone else. The preppies pushed us aside. This hypocrisy still makes me angry.

I think school shootings could happen at any high school. But I don’t believe the trouble is with groups like mine I don't know who are to blame. We should be thinking about the attitudes of the mainstream kids—the “jocks” or the “preps” or whomever—the popular groups in school who make other students feel rejected, angry, and depressed about themselves. My group wasn’t dangerous at all. We were just kids pushed aside who stopped trying to fit in.

The potentially dangerous kids are ones who withdraw from everyone, who seem hostile toward everyone. My high school had a group like this. A few boys didn’t fit in anywhere. They wore dark clothes (really—it’s not a stereotype) and sat in the back of their classes.
They weren’t interested in school and didn’t talk much to other people, but when they did they were rude to pretty much everybody. They loved computers, guns, and video games.

I can easily see how someone from that group could commit hate crimes. I can also see how it would be just like a video game for them.
Those boys didn’t handle their feelings of alienation in a healthy way. The scary thing is that it’s hard to tell the innocent, quiet, withdrawn kids from the hateful, planning, withdrawn kids.

The kids who do school shootings are not the only people to blame. I am not trying to justify violence in any way and school shootings are a horrible thing. But a lot of the kids who do shootings had been treated terribly. Even so, they will always be seen as the bad guys, the monsters. But isn’t there another side to the story?

People need to understand how cruel the popular cliques can be to outsiders. The popular kids (and their parents) believe they’re so perfect that they can’t see their own faults.
Instead of pulling schools and communities together, cliques drive people apart. The popular kids become scared of the people they cast out, we all become more separated, and the alienation grows.