Reading, writing and verbal torture

By Tamara Winfrey Bennett

What happened in Colorado was a horrible, horrible tragedy. A friend mentioned that every time she puts her kids on the bus, she wonders if it will be the last time she sees her children alive. It's sad and also infuriating that it has come to this. It's all such an awful waste. The only good thing that happened on that day is that these two young men took their own lives, thereby sparing us the agony of a trial and the expense of their lifetime incarceration. The bad part about that is that we may never really understand why they did what they did.

My understanding of the perpetrators is that they considered themselves outsiders and that they were sometimes picked on by fellow classmates. They were quiet, loners, kept pretty much to themselves ... this is all pretty old and familiar stuff. As a former quiet student who kept pretty much to herself and didn't cause trouble I can only offer my opinions on why this happened. I do not condone their actions. Make no mistake about that.

For ten years I was treated like a sideshow animal by my classmates. I was quiet because everything I said was ridiculed. I kept to myself because if I was noticed, I was tormented with name-calling, insults and tripping and shoving. Girls would write fake notes from popular boys asking me to be their girlfriend. They insulted my clothes, my hair and my face. From far off in the distance it was common for me to hear the exclamation, "Eeeewwww, it's the Ugly Girl!" They wouldn't let me have a seat on the bus. Sometimes I would be forced to sit with half my butt hanging off the seat because they wouldn't scoot over, and then the kids behind me would kick my rear end.

They put Mr. Yuk stickers in my hair and laughed at me behind my back as well as in front of me. Whether I was wearing a butterfly hair comb or just putting on a little eye shadow in the middle of class, I was continuously and relentlessly harassed for it. Many of the kids loved to call me a dog, and I'll never forget walking past a table full of cruel young boys at lunchtime to return my tray when they all started barking loudly at me in chorus. It was all very humiliating.

"I don't remember us ever being mean to them," one girl said on CNN. She probably genuinely has no recollection of anything being done to those kids. I'm sure Tammy Mocas doesn't remember standing over my desk with a stapler, ejecting staples into my hair as fast as she could, laughing while I sat at my desk fuming, unable to react in any way. Had I reacted, her entire gang would have tormented me, or I would have gotten into trouble with the teachers.

I'm sure Frank Lucas doesn't remember reducing me to tears in English class, tormenting me because I didn't have many friends. Alex Cates probably doesn't remember making my life pure hell for a solid year in middle school. The snotty girls in choir probably don't remember the catty faces they made at each other whenever I offered an opinion in class, or the snide comments they made behind my back. I'm sure no one remembers that I was always picked last for a team in Phys Ed and I'm pretty sure the boys don't remember acting like I was a leper whenever I got near them. The kids who rode my bus probably don't remember their favorite moniker for me, but I do. They called me Refried.

I don't know the extent to which these "Trenchcoat Mafia" members were singled out for this sort of treatment. The girl I saw on CNN may not have even known them or said one word to them, good or bad. Not everyone tormented me in school, but I grouped them all together because the ones who didn't pick on me were going along with the behavior of the rest. If they didn't torment me, I was social poison to them and they didn't want to be caught dead or alive around me.

It's so easy to become isolated, bitter and angry in an atmosphere like this. People wondered why I walked around with such an angry expression on my face all the time. They wondered why I wore the colors of the other school on so-called "spirit days." They had crushed my "spirit." These people were inhuman to me, I thought, why should I support the system that had made me miserable? They wondered why I was so quiet. They wondered why I dressed differently; it never occurred to them that the last thing I wanted was to be anything like them.

I'm sure the teachers would have put me into an anger management class had there been such a thing at the time. I was the one with the problem, not the kids who had put me through the mental equivalent of a POW camp. They were good kids who got good grades and went along with the social norms. They did things so-called "normal" kids do, such as sports - not sitting at the top of the slide at recess with their noses stuck in a book.

I survived because I knew that someday, somehow, I would be released. For a very long time there was no escape from this hell. I couldn't quit school, and I couldn't run away from home. I couldn't retaliate. It was like having no mouth and needing desperately to scream. Tearful pleas for intervention by staff members were brushed off. Time goes by painfully slowly when you're a kid, and I would watch the hours go by so very slowly, knowing that each hour that passed meant I was an hour closer to freedom. Someday I would graduate, turn eighteen and be free to go as far away from all of them as I wanted. A lot of kids can't see that far ahead. It's hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel when someone is harassing you 24/7.

Now, years later, I see reports on the news that the way the kids torment one another has grown a thousand times worse. Being picked on and teased is no reason to pick up a gun and start shooting, but it sure is making a lot of kids angry enough to do it anyway. I'm not saying that it's anyone's fault that this happened, but I am asking, when will we as a society teach our children that it is wrong to torment others? Does anyone take their children aside when they see them harassing other kids and tell them it's wrong? Does anyone teach their children to reach out to the lonely and the quiet?

The kids I knew who tormented me went to church on a regular basis. I thought they were supposed to learn about compassion and caring for their fellow humans. Instead they returned to school on Monday with a holier-than-thou attitude straight from hell. It was like a pack of wolves turning on one of their own.

We take so many great pains in our adult lives to be politically correct so as not to offend any adult in the slightest, but when a child is relentlessly harassed for trivial minutiae we just sit there and say, "kids can be cruel." If I spit on you, I can be arrested for assault. If I continually harass you, you can sue me for everything I have. But the picked-on-kid has no recourse against a bully. If the child lashes out, he is the one who is punished. If he goes to a teacher for help, the teacher ignores him. I don't understand why in this day and age of easy weapons access more of these tormented kids don't explode. Most people laughed at the movie Revenge of the Nerds. Unfortunately these days that revenge is very lethal. The kid you make fun of today may become your assassin tomorrow.

Sometimes I wish I had been born just ten years later so that I could have grown up in the age of litigation. I could have retained a lawyer and sued the school for nurturing a hostile environment and driven the school system into bankruptcy. I have a feeling that's what it will take to finally get schools and teachers to listen and do something about it. People seem to pay attention only when it hits their pocketbooks. Obviously when human life is lost they couldn't care less.

To this day I have frustrating dreams that I am being forced to go back to high school with all of my former classmates. I'm going to get picked on again. I haven't done any of my homework because it's taking all of my energy just to survive and I am frantic that I won't graduate and be done with them.

Considering life a precious commodity, I was and still am strongly convinced that there is very little in this world that is worth killing or dying for. I can't guarantee that given access to a gun at 12 or 13 that I wouldn't have acted, but I like to think that I wouldn't have. I guess the kids now disagree. Maybe all the television and movie violence has desensitized them, or maybe their parents don't discipline them. Maybe it's all this Ritalin we keep feeding them like M&M's. Maybe it's all the guns lying around.

Banning guns won't work, mostly because the solution is just too simple for such a complex problem. The boys in Colorado had home made bombs in addition to their guns. It's amazing what you can make with household chemicals. Any idiot can mix bleach and ammonia and create a deadly gas. Want to have some fun? You can make a bomb out of common items like aluminum foil and a 2 liter bottle. When the product dissolves it produces gas and the bottle will explode. Not two weeks ago a little bomb like that detonated in the very mall parking garage I use every day. Do you want to ban aluminum foil?

Should we put Prozac in the water supply? Should we ban trenchcoats? Should we send all the quiet ones to Charter Hospital? I'm not a genius, and I don't have all the answers. I'm just a quiet goth girl with a word processor and a little too much time on my hands.

Ironically, a letter concerning my ten year class reunion arrived in the mail the day of the shooting. I probably don't have to tell you where I put it.