Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (106 page)

One cannot deny
the effect that multiple factors can have on the mind of a teenage boy,
especially since most boys at that age feel they are invincible. However, the
external factors became the scapegoat. Teachers, counselors, and school
psychologists all pointed to the violent videogames, movies, and “goth” music
as the cause of this (kids roll their eyes whenever an adult uses the term
“goth” as most over the age of twenty-five have no clue what constitutes “goth”).

Somehow I knew
that Dee Snyder’s Congressional testimony in 1985 would be forgotten. How one
can deny the wisdom of the Twisted Sister is beyond me. The point is that
outsider music or violent videogames are easy to blame. They sit as big, fat
targets for the professionals to use as triggers for events such as these, even
though the majority of kids who listen to this music or play these games do not
open fire with machine guns on their classmates. (99.997 percent. I made that
up, but it sounds right.) I still listen to this music, and I am completely
normal (not really).

If you take this
one step further, the low Self-Esteem theory slides like Ricky Henderson into
second base, safely under the throw. Because these kids listened to music that
others found appalling, because they watched violent movies, and because they
played violent videogames, their peers ridiculed them. The “normal” kids teased
Dylan and Eric about their “outsider” beliefs, which lowered their Self-Esteem.
Once they had low Self-Esteem, they took out this aggression by killing
thirteen people.

Sounds
reasonable, but even Matlock can see through this. Consider this: An
interesting angle to the sadness is the fact that Harris was prescribed Luvox
and had it in his system at the time of the attack. This was after he took
Zoloft and complained of some of the same side effects documented years later,
such as suicidal and violent thoughts.

The boys amassed
an arsenal of weapons in their bedrooms, as many as ninety-nine explosive
devices, sawed-off twelve-gauge shotguns, and multiple nine-millimeter handguns.
And now we get to the crux of it all.

Were these boys
orphans? How did they manage to keep a bunker of explosives and semi-automatic
weapons in their
bedrooms
? When I was fourteen, I thought I had a good
hiding place for my
Hustler
magazine until my parents told me my younger
brother had found it. Gulp.

I wonder if a
lack of parenting had anything to do with the wayward paths of these tormented
young souls? Placing blame on the parents would be almost as bad as saying low
Self-Esteem caused this. But doesn’t it seem more plausible? These were
middle-class, white, suburban teenagers. Like Chris Rock joked, their biggest
worry is that they “had to drive a Nova.”

It becomes very
easy to cite low Self-Esteem, “goth” music, violent movies, and videogames as
the reason for wasted youth. But if you dig a little deeper, you realize that a
lot
of teenagers deal with these and do not turn to deadly violence as
an outlet.

***

The Self-Esteem
movement even has its clutches in recess. That’s right, the last bastion of
free play and creative growth for kids. Several schools in Wyoming and
Washington have banned tag at recess. Tag. In the city of Attleboro, school
administrators banned dodgeball, saying it was exclusionary and dangerous.
Modified versions now include softer balls and ways for children to reenter the
action.

An administrator
at one school became very concerned that students picked their own teams during
recess. They used the “hand over hand on the baseball bat” method, which most
of you probably remember from your own childhoods. This resulted in a child
being picked last. Oh, the horror. Hypersensitive school psychologists rush in
to save children from the horrible experience of being excluded (they were most
likely bullied as kids). How could we be so cruel as to allow this to happen?

It is all
revisionist history. Proponents of creating Self-Esteem will point to
“childhood traumas” as justification for not allowing kids to play tag or
dodgeball, or to pick teams. The reality is that adults’ recollections are
colored through the lens of low Self-Esteem. I am not suggesting that anyone
likes to be excluded or picked last. It sucks. However, it is something
children need to learn how to deal with, and if they are constantly
bubble-wrapped by adults looking to socially engineer the playground, they will
never develop those skills.

Ever been
standing in a line at a club and have the bouncer turn you away? Ever been
turned down for that promotion at the office? Every chased the girl of your
dreams only to have her spit in your face, slap you, and employ a restraining
order (me neither)? The Buddha said that life is disappointment, get used to
it. Scientists did a study that showed that people hardly ever get what they
want, but they get what they need (Dr. Jagger and Dr. Richards, 1969).

I feel the need
to quantify this so that I’m not brought up on charges or have my children
turned over to Social Services. I am not advocating the deliberate and
constructed use of exclusivity as a device to teach children how to deal with
disappointment. We need to strive to make sure this does not happen in a formal
classroom setting or other organized activity. But when it comes to kids
organizing themselves, such as during recess, we need to let them be.

I always hear
stories from adults who claim to remember being picked last as a kid and how
they still suffer from that. It usually comes from assholes that people still
shun. Go figure.

***

“I’m
good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me."

Remember
when Al Franken was funny? Laughing at
Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley
is dangerous if you are an educator. Play a clip at a faculty meeting, and you
will see people squirm.

This
is Self-Esteem at its most transparent. It became obvious to Franken in the
early 1980s how easy this was to lampoon, and yet we still deal with the
aftermath today.

Television
parodies are nothing new, and people find them funny because they contain two
thirds more truthiness than traditional comedy sketches (please do not sue me,
Stephen Colbert). Stuart made fun of our twelve-step programs. But if you peel
it back a layer, you will find that those programs flourished on the concept of
restoring Self-Esteem. When Smalley states, “I am a worthy human being,” he
does so on a full, Esteeming cup of Selfness.

Self-Esteem
develops
.
It is not
given
. Developing anything requires work, work that will not
always give positive results. Being given something is passive and dependent on
the giver for the quality of the gift. Self-Esteem is fostered by a sense of
purpose within one’s self, a drive to accomplish. That does not mean immediate
success, but it does mean a persistence to move forward. This is where the
Self-Esteem movement comes up short. If someone can lower your Self-Esteem, you
are dependent on them, and it cheapens the Esteem gained by those that do so
through hard work.

***

In 1984 I went
on vacation with my family to Ocean City, Maryland. For a kid growing up in a
working-class suburb of Pittsburgh, OC might as well have been the white sands
of the Caribbean. We felt the boardwalk was the epicenter of pop culture. Every
third shop sold the newest t-shirts, each one trying to outdo the next with the
hippest of the new.

A young Joe
Elliot, lead singer of Def Leppard, set the trends for gangly, pimply, preteen
boys of the 1980s. I look back at pictures from that trip and giggle at my
sleeveless Union Jack shirt, black parachute pants, coiffed hairdo, and the red
bandana around my neck like a cowboy of the Old West.

I strutted the
boardwalk, forcing my younger brother to walk three paces behind so as not to
detract from my cool factor. Young girls sighed and squealed as I walked by,
and I had to fend off quite a few tossed bras. (I’m not making this up, totally
true.) At thirteen and looking like the deranged Smurf version of Joe Elliot, I
thought I was the shit.

During the
course of that week, I pretended not to hear various comments about my attire,
my hair, and my acne. Nowadays, that would have been a vicious attack on my Self-Esteem.
It should have left me huddled in a corner, blowing snots into the red bandana,
and thinking I was “Coming Under Fire.”

Why didn’t it
happen? Partly because I didn’t give a fuck what people thought of me. I still
don’t. But it did not put the slightest crack into my Self-Esteem, because it
had nothing to do with my ability to succeed. Words can hurt, and we should
never permit children to hurt one another intentionally. However, hurt feelings
do not leach Self-Esteem and put you on the couch twenty years later.

I passed the
“New Wave” kids on the boardwalk, decked out in all black and mascara, looking
like sad Robert Smith clones. The fans of that music struck me as so pathetic.
They lacked Self-Esteem, and I remember thinking the concept was stupid.

Smells Like School Spirit

My brother
walked up to the casket and placed an official Terrible Towel next to my
grandfather.

“Hey, check it
out,” he said.

I took two steps
towards the coffin and could see the bright golden cloth next to a Bible and a
folded American flag. My mother walked up behind us, wiping the tears from her
eyes as she looked lovingly upon her dead father.

“That’s so
sweet. It’s what he would have wanted.”

For the next two
viewings, family members, friends, clergy, and others paid their last respects
to Andrew Rankinov, honoring his devotion to the church, his service to his
country, and his unwavering support of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

***

Pittsburgh began
as a trading outpost at the edge of the sixteenth-century frontier. A few wild
explorers established hunting camps that would later turn into forts in the
hilly terrain of the Ohio valley. George Washington fought Revolutionary War
battles on the banks of the three rivers, and as the West expanded, Pittsburgh
became a strategic trading town. It sits on the confluence of the Allegheny and
Monongahela rivers that flow together to form the Ohio River, a major tributary
feeding the Mississippi (as stated on every NFL broadcast done from Pittsburgh.
Also seen on every broadcast are the Duquesne Incline cars going up Mount
Washington, one labeled “De” and the other labeled “fense”).

In the heart of
the Rust Belt, manufacturing took hold in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries as names like Morgan, Carnegie, Frick, and Mellon made fortunes in
the soot-blackened mills on the banks of the rivers. The early twentieth
century marked the economic apex of the tenacious city. Steel manufacturing
became the predominant driver of the economy, and Pittsburgh cranked out steel
from its Homestead Works that can be found in skyscrapers and megastructures
worldwide, including the Empire State Building.

Around this
time, in the 1930s, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants by the name of Art
Rooney won twenty-five hundred dollars at the racetrack and used it to pay the
required National Football League entrance fee for a club he named the
Pittsburgh Pirates. The team became the Steelers and represented the heart and
soul of the city. For decades the team struggled to win even a few games and did
not enjoy sustained success until the 1970s, when they won four Super Bowls and
established what can now be called a dynasty.

The team does
not just play in Pittsburgh, it is Pittsburgh. The players wear black, the
color of the working man (at least by Johnny Cash’s definition). The name is
taken from the product that built the city and, some would argue, the modern
world. The team emblem, which was introduced in 1962, is based on the “steel
mark” containing three astroids. The original meanings behind the astroids
were, “Steel lightens your work, brightens your leisure, and widens your
world.” Later the colors came to represent the ingredients used in the
steel-making process, which were yellow for coal, red for iron ore, and blue
for scrap steel.

In the 1980s the
steel industry died, and the city found itself without an identity (including
the streets of Homestead, which resemble Kabul more than Kabul does). Many
communities that sprang up around the mills during the boom died, leaving
nothing but hulking masses of urban decay. Trees and greenery returned over the
decades, as did a resurgence in the local economy centered on the medical
industry. When I was a young boy, my grandfather swept his above-ground pool
every day, as the soot from the mills floated up the hills to Munhall, leaving
a fine layer of black dust on everything.

Through all of
the proverbial rough times, competition from Japan’s steel industry, and the
overall decline of the Rust Belt as the leader in domestic manufacturing, the
city clung to its beloved Steelers. (Cities such as Buffalo, Cleveland, and
Detroit did not fare much better. In fact, Pittsburgh seems to be the city of
these four that has weathered the changes the best.)