Columbine—10 Years Later

It’s hard to believe it has been only 10 years since that awful day in April of 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made murderous history at my old high school. So much has happened since then—so many events of great weight—that I wonder if it happened today would the Columbine murders have the same impact, or would they just be another statistic in a chain of ever-worsening world events?

Of course America is a country that is perpetually losing its innocence, but something seems different now. I used to think that these surreal times started with the persecution and impeachment of Bill Clinton—an absurd moment in American history if there ever were one. But more and more that spectacle seems to belong to an earlier period—itself a strange time, characterized by mockery, flippancy and callous “irony”.

Columbine, on the other hand, seems in retrospect to be more a transitional event, partaking both of themes from the preceding era and the one that would follow. In its ideological vacuity, its inward-looking obsession with provincial American social hierarchies, its shameless media-bating, its inspiration in the genre of black comedy (remember Heathers and Natural Born Killers?) Columbine seems in some ways like the epitome of hipster 90s (hipster unto death).

In many other ways though, it feels more like a gloomy omen of the decade that followed. The idea that the intention to die is the ultimate tool for murder is not new, but it until now it has never been the a dominant trope of an era. More importantly, though, the events at Columbine blew a hole in the in the myth of upper-middle class American suburban life as the epitome of human progress, comfort and well-being.

The media tried to make the story of Columbine about guns and video games and goth music, but strangely, almost no one looked at the physical world that kids are forced to inhabit. I moved with my family to the Columbine neighborhood just before going into the 10th grade. It was in a somewhat wealthier neighborhood than Green Mountain, my 9th grade high school—not that you could tell from external appearances. The two schools had exactly the same layout—a squat, prefab, modernist design. Like the junior high and elementary schools I attended, it was a layout that seemed designed to evoke a certain feeling—that education should be modular, synthetic, reproducible. Schools were factories for learning, in much the same way that architect Le Corbusier once argued that that houses should be “machines for living.” I don’t remember any outside windows in the classrooms.

It wasn’t just the high-school, of course. In spite of its mailing address in Littleton, the Columbine area is actually an unincorporated part of Jefferson County, without a main street or town center. As in most of suburbia, cultural life there centers around fast food, malls and chain stores. Even religious life has the outer trappings of big box stores and strip malls (down the street from the high school is a church housed in a converted K-Mart).

We have now entered an era that throws the basic premises of American life in to doubt. But the viability and health of a consumer economy driven by debt, finance, housing and sprawl was always questionable, even without the current credit crises or the looming threat of peak oil.

Since Columbine, there have been plenty of studies and analyses that point to the objective unhealthiness of the sprawl-based life, from correlations to obesity to the loss of community, to the excessive use of fossil fuels. Less talked about though, are things like wholeness, life, beauty, meaning. I am thinking of the characteristics of what Christopher Alexander, in The Timeless Way of Building called “The Quality Without a Name.” The fact is, human beings are not utilitarian machines; building a society that treats them as such is nothing less than pathological.

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