Geeks (15 page)

Schools all over the country openly embraced “Geek Profiling.” One group calling itself the National School Safety Center issued a checklist of “dangerous signs” to watch for in kids. It included mood swings, a fondness for violent TV or video games, cursing, depression, antisocial behavior and attitudes. (I don’t know about you, but I bat a thousand.)

The panic was fueled by a ceaseless bombardment of powerful, televised images of mourning and grief in Colorado, images that stir the emotions and demand some sort of response, even when it isn’t clear what the problem is.

The reliably blockheaded media response didn’t help.
Sixty
Minutes
devoted a whole hour to screen violence and games’ supposedly lethal impact on the young. The already embattled loners were besieged.

“This is not a rational world. Can anybody help?” asked Jamie, head of an intense Dungeons and Dragons club in Minnesota, whose school guidance counselor gave him a choice: give up the game or face counseling, possibly suspension. Suzanne Angelica (her online handle) was told to go home and leave her black, ankle-length raincoat there.

On
Star Wars
and
X-Files
mailing lists and websites and on AOL chat rooms and ICQ message boards, teenagers traded countless stories of being harassed, ostracized and ridiculed by teachers, students, and administrators for dressing and thinking differently from the mainstream. A few even wrote of being beaten. Many said they had some understanding of why the killers in Littleton went over the edge.

“We want to be different,” one of the Colorado killers declared in a diary found by the police. “We want to be strange and we don’t want jocks or other people putting us down.” The sentiment, if not the response to it, was echoed by kids all over the country. Now the Littleton killings have made their lives much worse.

“I’m a Quake freak, I play it day and night. I’m really into it. I play Doom a lot too, though not so much anymore. I’m up till 3
A.M.
every night. I really love it,” e-mailed Brandy from New York City. “But after Colorado, things got horrible. People were actually talking to me like I could come in and kill them. It wasn’t like they were really afraid of me—they just seemed to think it was okay to hate me even more. . . . People asked me if I had guns at home. This is a whole new level of exclusion, another excuse for the preppies of the universe to put down and isolate people like me.”

The e-mailed stories ranged from suspensions and expulsions for “antisocial behavior” to censorship of student publications to new restrictions on computing, Web browsing, and especially gaming. Everywhere, school administrators pandered and panicked, rushing to show they were highly sensitive to parents’ fears, even if they were oblivious to the needs and problems of many of their students.

Few of the week’s media reports—in fact, none that I saw—pointed out what the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, issued biannually, along with Justice Departments reports, academic studies, and some news stories have reported for years now: Violence among the young is dropping across the country, even as computing, gaming, cable TV, and other media use rises.

Unhappy, alienated, isolated kids are legion in schools, and voiceless in media, education, and politics. But theirs are the most important voices of all in understanding what happened and perhaps even how to keep it from happening again.

I referred some of my e-mailers to peacefire.org, a children’s rights website, for help in dealing with blocking and filtering software. I sent others to the website Free! (freedomforum.org) for help with censorship and free speech issues, and to geek websites, especially on ICQ.com where kids can talk freely.

I’ve also chosen some e-mail to partially reprint here. Although almost all of these correspondents were willing to be publicly identified—some demanded it—I’m using only their online names, since their stories could put them in peril from parents, peers, or school administrators.

From
Jay in the Southeast:

I stood up in a social studies class—the teacher wanted a discussion—and said I could never kill anyone or condone anyone who did kill anyone. But that I could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers. Because day after day, slight after slight, exclusion after exclusion, you can learn how to hate, and that hatred grows and takes you over sometimes, especially when you come to see that you’re hated only because you’re smart and different, or sometimes even because you are online a lot, which is still so uncool to many kids. . . .

After the class, I was called to the principal’s office and told that I had to agree to undergo five sessions of counseling or be expelled from school, as I had expressed “sympathy” with the killers in Colorado, and the school had to be able to explain itself if I “acted out.” In other words, for speaking freely, and to cover their ass, I was not only branded a weird geek, but a potential killer. That will sure help deal with violence in America.

From
Anika78 in suburban Chicago:

I was stopped at the door of my high school because I was wearing a trench coat. I don’t game, but I’m a geekchick, and I’m on the Web a lot. (I love geek guys, and there aren’t many of us.) I was given a choice—go home and ditch the coat, or go to the principal. I refused to go home. I have never been a member of any group or trench coat mob or any hate thing, online or any other, so why should they tell me what coat to wear?

Two security guards took me into an office, called the school nurse, who was a female, and they ordered me to take my coat off. The nurse asked me to undress (privately) while the guards outside the door went through every inch of my coat. I wouldn’t undress, and she didn’t make me (I think she felt creepy about the whole thing).

Then I was called into the principal’s office and he asked me if I was a member of any hate group, or any online group, or if I had ever played Doom or Quake. He mentioned some other games, but I don’t remember them. I’m not a gamer, though my boyfriends have been. I lost it then. I thought I was going to be brave and defiant, but I just fell apart. I cried and cried. I think I hated that worse than anything.

From
ES in New Jersey:

High school favors people with a certain look and attitude—the adolescent equivalent of Aryans. They are the chosen ones, and they want to get rid of anyone who doesn’t look and think the way they do. One of the things which makes this so infuriating is that the system favors shallow people. Anyone who took the time to think about things would realize that things like the prom, school spirit, and who won the football game are utterly insignificant in the larger scheme of things.

So anyone with depth of thought is almost automatically excluded from the main high school social structure. It’s like some horribly twisted form of Social Darwinism.

I would never, ever do anything at all like what was done in Colorado. I can’t understand how anyone could. But I do understand the hatred of high school life which, I guess, prompted it.

From
Jip in New England:

Dear Mr. Katz. I am 10. My parents took my computer away today, because of what they saw on television. They told me they just couldn’t be around enough to make sure that I’m doing the right things on the Internet. My mom and dad told me they didn’t want to be standing at my funeral someday because of things I was doing that they didn’t know about. I am at my best friend’s house, and am pretty bummed, because things are boring now. I hope I’ll get it back.

I was stunned by the flood of e-mail and media attention this column and those that followed soon generated. Unhappy kids now have a medium in which they can express, instantaneously and eloquently, the reality of their lives, both to one another and to the rest of the world. They used it.

Slashdot, which typically gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day, crashed repeatedly under the weight of all the people, mostly high school kids, trying to post messages about the column, not only that day but every day I passed along stories from the Hellmouth. For all of the messages that were posted or sent, thousands more never got through.

Soon, I was besieged by reporters from TV networks, radio news organizations, and newspapers, all wanting to write about what I called “geek profiling,” trying to get in touch with the kids who were e-mailing me, anxious to talk to kids who’d been punished, sent home for dressing oddly, suspended or otherwise singled out for daring to be different or—worst of all—for daring to express any sympathy or understanding for two killers. Several journalists, at my suggestion, posted messages on Slashdot, asking kids to contact them.

The columns were entered into the Congressional Record, linked to and reprinted on websites and mailing lists all over the world. They got distributed in high schools, posted on college bulletin boards. Daily newspapers reprinted parts of them as op-ed columns or quoted from them in editorials. They made their way to worried parents, usually at the hands of their children, who printed out and turned over the writings they hoped would help explain.

The message was getting out, and teachers and administrators were hearing it. The geek kids had done something remarkable, it seemed to me, and quite unprecedented: They had used their medium, the Net, to join the national debate and had altered the direction of a major story—one that was, thanks to knee-jerk journalists and opportunistic politicians, threatening to become a witch-hunt.

For me, the messages were raw and painful. I couldn’t stop reading them, alternating between rage and sorrow; it was like having my skin rubbed off. Every time I turned my e-mail program on, I faced hundreds of messages from kids, students, former students, parents, and teachers stacked in vast queues; it took hours just to download the mail. My computer wobbled under the strain; I had to replace it, losing several e-mail programs in the process. A couple of days later I fled to upstate New York, where I own a small cabin that serves as a writing retreat. I brought my laptop, which soon also labored under the e-mail onslaught.

These kids seemed so smart and articulate, almost passionately idealistic, and they seemed to be suffering so pointlessly. Now, along with feeling lonely and humiliated, they had all become suspects.

Determined to answer their e-mail, I took to eating meals at my computer (not good for keyboards) and hardly left the house.

Some of the voices were so plaintive and compelling I couldn’t get them out of my head. I referred several of the most unnerving cases to the teachers, social workers, and other older geeks who’d volunteered to help. Within a few days, we had an informal online counseling service under way, trying to send kids who seemed to be in serious trouble to sympathetic parents or professionals.

The experience was extraordinary. As
The New York Times
pointed out, Slashdot had become the focal point for geek misery in America, a subcultural phenomenom that crystallized post-Littleton and, thanks to the Net and Web, had become part of the dialogue.

It seems taken for granted in America that life for idiosyncratic, individualistic kids is brutal. Several critics wrote dismissively that these were just spoiled middle-class children whining about their privileged places in life. I can say with utter conviction that nothing could have been further from the truth. An electronic river of true pain had sprung up in that period of national soul-searching, far deeper than I’d imagined, and it was wrenching to have so much of it run literally through my fingers.

From police in a Massachusetts town, I heard of a fourteen-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom with his father’s shotgun in his mouth, a computer screen open to Slashdot. His life was simply unbearable, for all the usual reasons, and the Columbine coverage persuaded him it would only get worse. It took the cops and other frightened adults three hours to persuade him to put the gun down. It was an incident I declined to share with Slashdot readers, nor did I tell them about a fifteen year old in the Midwest with a history of emotional problems who e-mailed me every day for weeks after Columbine asking for help. He routinely had his books stolen, got punched and kicked, was laughed at when he spoke in class and ignored by teachers; for him, there was no Mr. Brown. He said he had twice tried suicide.

In the charged atmosphere after Littleton, it struck me as unwise to circulate such extreme stories among kids who already felt vulnerable and angry. Yet it was a reminder of what relentless harassment and exclusion could, in some cases, produce.

I forwarded many of these e-mails to Jesse, which was wrenching for both of us. We talked nearly continuously, via phone and e-mail, about what to tell individual kids. I passed along his exhortations to endure, and to use the Net to make friendly connections. “Tell them to hang on,” Jesse advised. “High school can be hell, but there is life beyond, and tell them that on the Net, we geeks are not alone anymore.”

He knew what they were feeling. He recounted time after time how he would break every rule at Middleton High, speak openly about the persecution that sometimes led to violence, wear clothes calculated to upset the school administration, make statements that drove the Mormon majority crazy. He’d been a provocateur.

Yet he was among several friends and advisers cautioning me that perhaps I had written enough. Rob Malda, the founder of Slashdot, was also urging me to stop. The site was crashing under the traffic, and Slashdot had had to cut off public posts after the first two hundred to keep from being overwhelmed. In fact, Rob was deliberately running other stories and links ahead of my columns, in order to get some information out before the site went down as readers rushed to respond. My family was growing concerned about my haunted look; I was having trouble sleeping.

But like it or not, I was the conduit, the transmitter. There seemed no end to these stories, or to their power. The second column, also abridged:

VOICES FROM THE HELLMOUTH

THE MESSAGES
started coming in a trickle Friday afternoon, then a torrent by Monday. They were wrenching, sometimes astonishing, an electronic outpouring of breathtaking anger and compassion.