Posted on 05/14/2004 9:49:55 PM PDT by neverdem
After I wrote a column a few weeks ago about the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, I got e-mail from Tom Klebold, the father of Dylan Klebold, one of the shooters. Tom objected to the column, but the striking thing about his note was that while acknowledging the horrible crime his son had committed, Tom was still fiercely loyal toward him. Which prompts this question: If your child commits a crime like that, what do you do with the rest of your life?
Tom and Susan Klebold have not really spoken to the press about all this. But the lawsuits against them are being settled, and they trust The New York Times, which is the paper they read every day, so they were willing to have a long conversation with me this week.
They are a well-educated, reflective, highly intelligent couple (Dylan was named after Dylan Thomas). During our conversation they discussed matters between themselves, as well as answering my questions. Their son, by the way, is widely seen as the follower, who was led by Eric Harris into this nightmare.
The Klebolds describe the day of the shootings as a natural disaster, as a "hurricane" or a "rain of fire." They say they had no intimations of Dylan's mental state. Tom, who works from home and saw his son every day, had spent part of the previous week with Dylan scoping out dorm rooms for college the next year.
When they first heard about the shootings, it did not occur to them that Dylan could be to blame. When informed, Susan said, "we ran for our lives." They went into hiding, desperate for information. "We didn't know what had happened," she said. "We couldn't grieve for our child."
That first night, their lawyer said to them, "Dylan isn't here anymore for people to hate, so people are going to hate you." Even as we spoke this week, Tom had in front of him the poll results, news stories and documents showing that 83 percent of Americans had believed the parents were partly to blame. Their lives are now pinioned to this bottomless question: Who is responsible?
They feel certain of one thing. "Dylan did not do this because of the way he was raised," Susan said. "He did it in contradiction to the way he was raised."
After the shooting, they faced a simple choice: to move away and change their names, or to go back and resume their lives. Susan thinks about leaving every day. "I won't let them win," Tom said. "You can't run from something like this."
So they live in the same house and work at the same jobs. Susan works in the community college system. "It's amazing how long it took me to get up and say my name at a meeting, to say, `I'm Dylan Klebold's mother,' " Susan says. "Dylan could have killed any number of the kids of people that I work with."
In general, Tom said, "most people have been good-hearted." Their friends rallied around. Their neighbors call to warn them if an unfamiliar car lurks in the neighborhood. There is a moment of discomfort when they hand over a credit card at a store, but there have been few bad scenes. One clerk looked at the name and remarked to Susan, "Boy, you're a survivor, aren't you."
The most infuriating incident, Susan said, came when somebody said, "I forgive you for what you've done." Susan insists, "I haven't done anything for which I need forgiveness."
When they talk about the event, they discuss it as a suicide. They acknowledge but do not emphasize the murders their son committed. They also think about the signs they missed. "He was hopeless. We didn't realize it until after the end," Tom said. Susan added: "I think he suffered horribly before he died. For not seeing that, I will never forgive myself."
They believe that what they call the "toxic culture" of the school — the worship of jocks and the tolerance of bullying — is the primary force that set Dylan off. But they confess that in the main, they have no explanation.
"I'm a quantitative person," said Tom, a former geophysicist. "We're not qualified to sort this out." They long for some authoritative study that will provide an answer. "People need to understand," Tom said, "this could have happened to them."
My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior. Now his parents have been left with the terrible consequences. I'd say they are facing them bravely and honorably.
As a parent, I've got to believe that being a parent of a child that caused such grief for others must be much more excruciating than losing a child.
I think these folks have some serious denial. It may not have been their fault, but their son was their responsibility. They obviously failed on some level. And I resent the way they attempt to blame jocks and bullying.
Shows extreme lack of judgment.
I thought it was all the guns' fault.
I have always heard, even from fellow mental health professionals, that great parents can have a terrible son.
I have, in 57 years of watching families closely, NEVER observed it.
I have always been able to find--with enough questions, PLENTY of responsibility on the part of the parents parenting practices; lack of heart to heart caring and bonding etc.--especially the first 6-8 years of life.
Of course, parents are never very happy to realize they have been in any way responsible for a child turning out less well than the child might have turned out.
Blame seems to be a national constitutional right.
Certainly children are still responsible for their behavior. But there is a reason that 75%+ of prison populations come from horrid parenting.
I would agree. But it still sounds like they are in some measure of mindless liberal denial.
I agree with the author on Klebold being responsible for his own actions, but if I were to play the blame game I would look at Hollywood and the FBI/ATF.
The doomed duo clearly copied the lobby scene from 'The Matrix' where Neo and Trinity kill all the guards and reinforcements in gravity defying style, all set to a rock beat.
The first time I viewed this scene I was very impressed, but since buying the DVD and watching it several more times I can't get over how corny and stupid it actually is. However, two teenage boys would be awestruck.
Where else could a young man find such vivid images of total control, power and murderous mayhem? The nightly news,of course.
Watching the FBI's RV/Tank tear holes in the Waco home of the Branch Davidians, followed by the fire and extermination of nearly everyone inside must of been a rush to these kids. Something to imitate if you wanted to show your power over others.
The fact that they had planted an explosive(dud) to start a fire in the kitchen and that they had originally planned to attack the school on April 19, same as Waco, but were pushed back a day due to not having the bombs and weapons ready, is evidence to support the theory that they wanted to copy their government's actions.
Particularly since those two were prone to bullying other kids themselves.
Someone posted an article a while back where a psychiatrist had analyzed the journals of Harris and Klebold and concluded that one of them (forget which) was an ordinary depressed kid who probably could have been salvaged if he had gotten away from his parther and gotten some psychiatric help. The other kid, though, was a budding psychopath who was bent on havoc, and nothing and no one could have stopped him. If he hadn't shot up Columbine he would have done something else eventually.
After the fact, it is easy to see everything. Your questions are designed to elicit the answers you WANT to hear. Most WANT to believe the parents have to be rotten because it makes them feel safely immune. You must also remember that the child is influencing the parenting as much as the parenting is influencing the child.
It's easy to be a good parent to a great kid. It is MUCH harder to be a good parent to a kid with difficulties.
Yeah, I remember that too. Klebold was the depressed one, and Harris was the psycho.
Look at our world.....there is diminishing love , committment , caring, affection ........
I think we try to replace all that with material goods.....bet Dylan had anything he wanted....
sometimes , people that are profoundly sad or depressed once they develop a "plan" or and "out" can go about their business with levity....like looking at dorm rooms....
I understand your point.
And I probably couldn't say there's 0.00000% of such going on.
However, many times, I have not questioned the parents at all directly. I've either observed from a distance or asked friends and relatives about whether this or that sort of phenomenon existed between dad or mom and the child. Invariably significant key markers that I've looked for have been missing.
Yes, some children are very difficult and take tons more time, energy, creativity, warmth, hugging, patience to connect with. Nevertheless, if a parent is going to be a parent, it seems to me, that at least the minimum tolerable commitment they are making is
TO CONNECT WITH THAT CHILD sufficiently for the child to develop into a healthy productive adult.
Tooooooooo many other things take priority--sometimes even providing the child THINGS to keep up with the Jones' kids. Then there's the parents' own egos, status, obsessions, addictions, workaholism etc. Those are all CHOICES PARENTS make.
CHILDREN SPELL LOVE . . . . T I M E.
Few modern parents insure sufficient quantities of it at all, much less in warm, receptive, listening modes.
Understandably, many kids grow up convinced that parents love their cars, their clubs, their jobs, their clothes, their images, their press clippings, their pride, their games, their TV shoes . . . MORE than they love the child.
Doesn't exactly give the children a leg-up on life.
The Times wants you to pay for older stuff, but a google can catch reprints. Here's the URL
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/2004/04/28/news/opinion/8536647.htm?1c
Posted on Wed, Apr. 28, 2004
Columbine teens, suicide bombers: Why did they kill?
We tend to assume that perpetrators are victims, but is it true?
DAVID BROOKS
New York Times
Five years ago, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School. Now it's clear that much of what we thought about that horror was wrong.
In the weeks following the killings, commentators and psychologists filled the air with theories about what on earth could have caused those teenagers to lash out as they did. The main one was that Harris and Klebold were the victims of brutal high school bullies. They were social outcasts, persecuted by the jocks and the popular kids. But there were other theories afloat: They'd fallen in with a sick Goth subculture; they were neglected by their families; they were influenced by violent video games; they were misfits who could find no place in a conformist town.
All these theories had one theme in common: that the perpetrators were actually victims. They had been so oppressed and distorted by society that they struck back in this venomous way. In retrospect, it's striking how avidly we clung to this perpetrator-as-victim narrative. It's striking how quickly we took the massacre as proof that there must be something rotten at Columbine High School.
As we've learned more about Harris and Klebold, most of these misconceptions have been exposed. The killers were not outcasts. They did not focus their fire on jocks, or Christians or minorities. They were not really members of a "Trenchcoat Mafia."
This week, in a superb piece in Slate magazine, Dave Cullen reveals the conclusions of the lead FBI investigator, Dwayne Fuselier, as well as the Michigan State psychiatrist Frank Ochberg and others who probed into the Columbine shootings.
Harris and Klebold "laughed at petty school shooters," Cullen reports. They sought murder on a grander scale. They planned first to set off bombs in the school cafeteria to kill perhaps 600. Then they would shoot the survivors as they fled. Then their cars, laden with still more bombs, would explode amid the crowd of rescue workers and parents rushing to the school. It all might have come off if they had not miswired the timers on the propane bombs in the cafeteria.
What motivated them? Here, Cullen says, it is necessary to distinguish Klebold from Harris. Klebold was a depressed and troubled kid who could have been saved. Harris was an icy killer. He once thought about hijacking a plane and flying it into Manhattan.
Harris wasn't bullied by jocks. He was disgusted by the inferior breed of humanity he saw around him. He didn't suffer from a lack of self-esteem. He had way too much self-esteem.
It's clear from excerpts of Harris' journals that he saw himself as a sort of Nietzschean Superman -- someone so far above the herd of ant-like mortals he did not even have to consider their feelings. He rises above good and evil, above the contemptible slave morality of normal people. He can realize his true, heroic self, and establish his eternal glory, only through some gigantic act of will.
"Harris was not a wayward boy who could have been rescued," Cullen writes. Harris, the FBI experts believe, "was irretrievable."
Now, in 2004, we have more experience with suicidal murderers. Yet it is striking how resilient this perpetrator-as-victim narrative remains. We still sometimes assume that the people who flew planes into buildings -- and those who blew up synagogues in Turkey, trains in Spain, discos in Tel Aviv and schoolchildren this week in Basra -- are driven by feelings of weakness, resentment and inferiority. We cling to the egotistical notion that it is our economic and political dominance that drives terrorists insane.
But it could be that whatever causes they support or ideologies they subscribe to, the one thing that the killers have in common is a feeling of immense superiority. It could be that they want to exterminate us because they regard us as spiritually deformed and unfit to live, at least in their world. After all, it is hard to pull up to a curb, look a group of people in the eye and know that in a few seconds you will shred them to pieces unless you regard other people's deaths as trivialities.
If today's suicide bombers are victims of oppression, then the solution is to lessen our dominance, and so assuage their resentments. But if they are vicious people driven by an insatiable urge to dominate, then our only option is to fight them to the death.
We had better figure out who these bombers really are.
After Columbine, we got it wrong.
David Brooks
David Brooks is a New York Times columnist. Write him at 1627 I St. NW, Washington, DC 20006 or at dabrooks@nytimes.com.
I don't think we will ever know what went wrong but kids are often depressed or bullied and don't end up killing people.
The parents certainly were not paying close enough attention to what these kids were up to.
You may not be aware of a study of all the studies of child rearing practices some 25-35 years ago.
They compared all the variables they could. Socio-economic status; discipline styles--authoritarian, authoritative, laissez faire (sp); consensus; democratic etc.; number of children; geographic areas; rural, city; education levels; IQ etc.
There was ONE variable which accounted for more than 80% of the varience.
The criteria of measure used over the longitudinal studies was:
As adults, did the children
1) stay off welfare
2) stay productively employed
3) stay married
4) stay out of trouble with the law
That was defined as success as an adult.
Can you guess what that one variable was?
Whether or not the child
FELT
loved.
NOT: WAS the child loved--but
DID THE CHILD *******FEEL******* LOVED.
That tends to be a huge difference in some situations.
That's right .. they may have been shunned by other kids at the school in general, but those kids were right to keep such hostile, arrogant, dangerous people out of their lives. Harris and Klebold were the unforgiving, judgemental bullies.
So have you.
Hasn't always been after the fact, either.
I've often made predictions of 1-2 year olds and noted that when those children got to be teens in that home, that there would be hell to pay. I was rarely wrong.
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