Summer Reading - Book #1: Columbine, by David Cullen.
An excerpt from chapter The Downward Spiral: Good-Bye, page 186-187:
At this point, nearly two years before Columbine, Dylan saw the guns as his last resort. He continued his spiritual quest, “i stopped the pornography,” he said. “I try not to pick on people.” But God seemed intent on punishing him. “A dark time, infinite sadness, ” he wrote. “I want to find love.” Love was the most common word in Dylan’s journal. Eric was filling his website with hate.
This book is simply an example of excellent journalism. Cullen meticulously organized and analysed, with the help of experts, thousands of evidence: video tapes, journals, camera surveillance footages, news articles, ballistics, interviews, testimonials, court documents, and many other materials. He then coherently strung his findings together, presenting us with a clear picture of what happened before, during, and after Columbine. Cullen also maintained his objectivity about the case by not making up any dialogue and removing himself from being the main narrator of the book. Most of the passages were written based on the evidence he shifted through or from the Klebold’s and Harris’ journals. He stressed that “no dialogue were made up”. Moreover, each ‘character’ in Columbine is presented as whole as possible. When a conflict or a dispute arose, Cullen made sure that everyone who’s involved in it had the opportunity to explain themselves. Everyone is a mixture of good and bad and that’s normal.
Cullen’s greatest accomplishment, however, is in how despite the abundance of evidence and input from top criminal psychologists and crime experts from the FBI, he is still careful in drawing out conclusions, especially about why the boys did it. Throughout the book Cullen debunked a lot of myths regarding the boys’ motives for doing the massacre, stating either there were no supporting evidence or pointing out that there were contradictory reports. Most of the Columbine myths, as it turned out, were sparked by the media (sigh) and based on unreliable witness testimony. People who are under duress make unreliable witness, them being 14 - 18 year olds only make it more so.
He noted, however, that they boys’ early lives could give more light to why they became who they were but, as no one knows for sure what happened, we could only make educated assumptions based on existing evidence. Furthermore, he dedicated a whole chapter on Psychopathy in an attempt to understand how Harris developed it so extremely, so fast (Harris was the only psychopath one out of the two, Klebold was thought to be a classic depressive who “got conscripted into murder”).
It’s a bit difficult for me to write coherently about this book. As a clinical psychology student, this book is valuable in a way that it gives a small yet invaluable insights on how a young psychopath’s mind works. There’s still a lot to learn about psychopathy and unfortunately there’s no cure for it yet. At the end of the book we may still don’t know why Dylan and Eric did it. But Cullen also wrote a lot about of the survivors and it’s amazing how resilient young people are.
A quote at the beginning of the book:
The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. - Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.
