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127   7 Adult Bullies In the suicide note found after the Columbine massacre, Eric Harris blamed the classmates who tormented him, but he also accused the adults who allowed it to happen: By now, it’s over. If you are reading this, my mission is complete. . . . 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. THEY ARE FUCKING DEAD. . . . Surely you will try to blame it on the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, or the way I choose to present myself, but no. Do not hide behind my choices. You need to face the fact that this comes as a result of YOUR CHOICES. Parents and teachers, you fucked up. You have taught these kids to not accept what is different. YOU ARE IN THE WRONG. I have taken their lives and my own—but it was your doing. Teachers, parents , LET THIS MASSACRE BE ON YOUR SHOULDERS UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE.1 Eric and his friend Dylan Klebold were, of course, the ones who made the vicious choice to pick up guns and respond to bullying with murder. Like so many other school shooters, however, they were left largely on their own to deal with the humiliation, exclusion, and violence they faced daily at school. That’s why many of them said they retaliated. In 166 school shootings between 1979 and 2009, recall that over 150 parents, teachers, administrators, coaches, and other adults were killed or wounded. According to the memoir written by Brooks Brown, who said he had been one of Dylan’s close friends since grade school, the abuse he and Dylan experienced came not only from other students but from teachers as well. In second grade, Brooks recalled, he and Dylan were playing 128  Adult Bullies in the mud and accidentally splashed a little girl’s new jacket. They tried to explain that it wasn’t on purpose, but their teacher glared at them and insisted they spend hours cleaning the jacket with a toothbrush as punishment for what was perceived as their malicious deed. ”Don’t you have any respect for other people’s property?” the teacher yelled. Brooks said, “It was the first time in our young lives that we felt like an adult hated us.” The teachers were no better than the kids, he continued. They picked on students for the smallest infraction, mocking them for picking their nose, ridiculing them in front of their peers. Some were especially cruel to the boys and others nastier to the girls.2 The mean-spirited hierarchy, writes Brooks, was replayed in one way or another by those who had the most power in school—teachers, coaches, and principals, as well as those referred to as jocks. They often seemed to take it for granted that the less popular students would be treated badly. According to Brooks, he and Dylan got into a special program for highly intelligent students and found themselves hit on the head by those sitting behind them, while the teachers looked the other way.3 Eric Harris’s concerns about teachers were echoed in the online journal of Kimveer Gill, the twenty-five-year-old who wounded twenty people and killed one before committing suicide at Dawson College in Montreal in September 2006. This Canadian case contains some variations on most school shooting stories: Kimveer was not a student at the time of the shooting, and his friends said that in high school he had been quiet and introverted but not a target of bullies. Whether this was the case or not, however, this alienated young man identified with bullying victims, and he carried out his shooting in a school setting. He, too, placed blame on an adult society that created brutal hierarchies and then ignored their effects. I’m so sick of hearing about jocks and preps making life hard for the goths and others who look different, or are different. . . . Why does society applaud jocks? I don’t understand. They are the worse kind of people on earth. And the preps are no better, they think they’re better than others . . . but they’re not. And all of society applauds the jocks and preps. As if we are all supposed to be like them. Newsflash motherfuckers: We will never be like them. NEVER. Stop Bullying It’s not only the bully’s fault...

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