Posted by JonKatz on Tuesday April 27, @01:00PM EDT from the struggling-to-understand dept. More stories from the Hellmouth that is High School for many bright, individualistic American kids continued to pour in yesterday. They are jarring testimonials from kids, adults, men and women. In the past four days, I've gotten well over 2000. These stories, many of them painful and engraged, tell us more about what happened in Littleton, Colorado -- a lot more -- than the dumb, exaggerated, frightening alarms about video games, Goths and geek monsters pouring out of much of the mainstream media. Update: 04/27 07:44 by CT: Sharon Isaak from Dateline NBC wants to get in touch with folks to do a story on this subject for this show. She's specifically seeking Jay of the Southeast, Anika78 of suburban Chicago, ZBird of New Jersey, Dan in Boise, Idaho, but he'd also like anyone who's been targetted as a result of this thing to contact her. Wonder if they make ya wear pancake makeup...
The messages started coming in a trickle Friday afternoon, then a torrent by Monday. They were wrenching, sometimes astonishing, an electronic outpouring of anger and compassion.
These jarring testimonials explained more - a lot more - about Littleton than all the vapid media stories about video violence, Goths, game-crazed geeks.
For a writer, there? s nothing more humbling than to be at a loss for words. I can't do more justice to these stories than to let them speak for themselves.
By last night, I had received thousands of e-mails about life in junior and high school. Few remembered it fondly - none, in fact. Some had unbearable memories. Some are still recovering. Many more are still there, suffering every day.
Many of you wrote asking if you could help these kids. Others wondered if there was any way to get the message about their lives out beyond Slashdot, if these stories might reach the mainstream media in some form.
Don't worry about that. The column and the responses to it richocheted all over the world, via e-mail, mailing lists, links, even faxes. There were scores of requests to reprint. For any others, and on behalf of Slashdot, be my guest.
On the Net, ideas don't need to be pushed. They find their own audience and stand or fall of their own weight. Eventually, I will answer each e-mail, and am grateful for them.
In the wake of the killings in Littleton, Colorado, here are more stories from The Hellmouth, from its current and former children:
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>From Eric near Littleton, Colorado:
"?I live just a few miles north of the school between the same streets. I'm a geek under the skin. I was a state champ in the high jump, and the leading scorer on the track team, so I was not quite the outcast that some of the geeks are, but I understand what they are going through. I wasn't very popular despite being the big athlete on campus, but I at least had respect.
I am very happy to see you and Slashdot carrying coverage of "the other side" of the story; the side nobody else wants to look at. These outcast kids are now being swept under the rug at best, and prosecuted at worst."
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>From Josh, a Slashdot reader:
"I was much like those kids when I was in school - weird, cast out, not much liked, alienated, all that sort of thing'I used to imagine bringing weaponry to school and making the fuckers who made my life miserable beg for mercy. (I was never sure what to do then, though. Do I let them go? They won't have learned, and after that, I could never turn my back. Do I kill them? I really just wanted to be left alone'Remember the scene in "Ender's Game.") I think my parents and their support made a lot of difference to me."
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>From John of Austin:
"?you can probably imagine the emotional scars that I still tote around with me at age 26. I still have yet to go to college, I have shelves upon shelves of books that I have bought, read and committed to memory. From literature to computer programming, there is no one that I can't have a meaningful and informed conversation with.
But to this day, the thought of entering another educational institution to prove that I have the facilities to be a ?meaningful? member of society makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and turns my stomach inside out.
"I am the father now, and as such I worry about the kind of life my son will lead, too much at times, I'm sure'A few weeks ago I was watching the TLC (The Learning Channel) or the Discovery channel, and there was a special on the social structure within the United States prison system on. While I was watching it, I was thinking to myself just how similar it was to the social structure we find in schools.."
>From
-------- http://slashdot.org/features/99/04/27/0310247.shtml
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>From Dan:
"How dare you glorify these scum? They were Nazi thugs, nothing more, nothing less. They are brutal murderers. They planned this on Hitler's Birthday, for God's sake. What kind of creep are you? How dare you compare them to geeks? They deserved everything they had coming to them, and so do you. May they rot in Hell."
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CB