Following on from Colin’s post, and in the midst of a nasty head cold, a thought came to me today while ruminating over Saturday morning’s events:
With Columbine, Harris and Klebold were pilloried by the media and the general public, while the victims were one miracle short of sainthood.
With Capitol Hill, Huff is an enigma to the media and the public, but the victims are getting blamed, directly or indirectly.
Why?
I think we’re trying to explain the inexplicable by trying to rationalize our way out of it. The murderer’s motive is a riddle, so we try subbing in all the other facts of the case so that we can at least have some perverted conclusion of justice.
It’s like playing a game of Clue, only you’re out to explain the inexplicable murder by assuming Col. Mustard’s killing of Mr. Boddy is justified, because after all, Mr. Boddy was a homo/nerd/candy raver/abortionist/Republican operative. And he wouldn’t have done it if the Feds hadn’t lifted its ban on assault candlesticks (to say nothing of no laws against billiard rooms!)
And, of course, this is totally wrong. The victims didn’t “deserve” it. They weren’t out all night destroying property and threatening people’s lives. Maybe their own zeal to be open and inclusive brought the wrong person into their lives at the wrong time, but at this point we don’t hear of them saying there were any warning signs that Huff was dangerous or out for blood.
I was thinking about all of this because I still hold some sympathy for Harris and Klebold. What they did was ghastly, but I understood the feeling of being builled and locked out of the high school social scene, and there were points in my low moments when I wondered if shooting up the school would have made things better. In the end, I didn’t, because I knew that violent explosions wouldn’t have gained me — or anyone — anything. The victims would be martyrs, and I would be the evil. Eventually, I graduated and moved on, and eventually learned to let go of my high school anger and forgive my bullies.
And that’s what makes me mad about the media coverage. Here, the tables were flipped — the victims weren’t the popular, photogenic, white kids walled off in their brutish cliques, but a multicultural, multiethnic, multiage hodgepodge collection of people who chose not to be cliqueish and xenophobic but instead chose to be open, friendly, and decent to one another and to outsiders. And what do they get for all this? Branded. Dismissed. And directly or indirectly, blamed.
This lifelong nerd and spazz stands alongside all the candy ravers, punks, queers, artsy types, and everyone else ever castigated for being different and beaten down by the bullies of the world. We’ve all been blamed as victims. It has to stop, here and now. We have to accept that this crime may always remain inexplicable, somewhat random, and probably without clear motive. It’s not OK, but it’s the way things are.
Seven humans died on Saturday for no good reason. Trying to figure out where to lay the blame is a fool’s errand.