To the rest of us, it sounds insane. Perhaps if Eric had said this when he and Dylan first met, Dylan would have thought it insane as well. But with the formation of that bond that only the closest of friends can know, Dylan came to look up to Eric. He trusted in him. He wasn't getting the answers he wanted anywhere else.
I knew Dylan long enough to know that he didn't start out as a monster. He became one. That's what makes his fate so scary.
The next Dylan could be your son. Your neighbor. Your best friend. Not some faceless, anonymous killer who comes out of the dark and snatches your loved ones. A regular person who faces the cruelty of the real world just like the rest of us—and in whom something erodes away over time.
It's too late to stop Eric and Dylan. But maybe if we realize what we're doing to one another and take action now, we can save the kids who would otherwise go down the same path.
Not all kids become hopeless at an early age like Eric and Dylan did. Some hold on to their ideals, and fight for change. I respect them so much, because, as I learned, the political machine can prove a formidable challenge.
In the summer of 2001, I got a call from David Winkler of SAFE Colorado. SAFE (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic) Colorado is a group of teenage activists based in Denver. They often make trips to Washington, D.C. to lobby senators and congressmen; Winkler told me they were planning such a trip for late July. Their purpose was to fight for a change in gun show legislation, one that would require all sellers to run background checks on customers.
I agreed to go along. This would be my first chance to visit the nation's capital as a lobbyist, meet with politicians, and get an up-close look at the political machine.
We were hit with disappointment once we arrived. One of our own state representatives, Republican Scott McIniss of Grand Junction, refused to so much as meet with us. His spokesman argued that because McIniss had met with members of the group two years ago—right after the Columbine shootings—and because SAFE Colorado had a different stance on guns than he did, he didn't care to speak with us on this trip.
“We feel their points are the same and our points are the same, so there's really not much more to discuss,” spokesman Blain Rethmeier told the Rocky Mountain News.
On the way to Washington, I'd talked with a lot of the SAFE Colorado kids. They were smart, idealistic kids who believed they could make a difference. Now they were being told that their own congressman wouldn't give them the time of day.
We did get to meet with other members of Congress. It was educational, to say the least. I had come for an up-close look at what the system was really like, and that's exactly what I got.
People talk all the time about how Washington is corrupt. It's not exactly a revelation. However, it's a different experience to be in the halls of Congress, talking with a senator, when her aide informs her that one of her allies has suddenly switched his vote. She looks down and says under her breath, “Well, I wonder what he got.”
At one point I was in the room with two congressmen, and I overheard one of them talking with his aide. They were preparing a photo with members of the SAFE Colorado contingent. The congressman asked, “Did you make sure you have a mixed bag of races?”
I tried to do some lobbying with a freshman representative. He wasn't there when I came to his office, but his aides talked to me. They were extremely honest about their stance on gun control. “Here's how it is,” one of them said. “We're brand new in this office; we still don't understand how Congress works. All I know is that what helped us get here is our gun stance, and we can't change that or else the National Rifle Association will take our funding away. So what else can we do?”
I appreciated that honesty, even if the message was pretty upsetting. Many other members of Congress wouldn't even talk to us, or else they dodged our questions.
After our first day of lobbying, I sat around talking with other kids from SAFE Colorado. They were so frustrated. Most of them were younger than me, and they were so full of ideals. They really cared. They wanted to bring about change.
The experience of seeing Washington in action had brought many of them down. They were realizing that this trip wasn't going to affect anything; the system was far too massive and corrupt for them to change. All that went through my mind was that this was the moment when their hope was being broken, like so many others before them.
That thought affected the hell out of me. I had seen enough hopelessness. It was time to prove that we could get something done.
I sat down with David Winkler and Ben Gelt, two other guys from the program. They felt the same way I did. After brainstorming, we came up with an idea for a new project. Using their camera, the three of us wanted to find the top six senators and congressmen who were opposed to gun legislation and get interviews with them on tape. We could then put together a film about our experiences once we got home.
In particular, we thought back to Representative Scott McIniss, who had snubbed our group the day before. We were going to make him talk to us, one way or another.
The next day, Ben and I went to McIniss's office with Ben's video camera. We said we were making a movie about gun control, and that we wanted to get McIniss's comments on tape. They told us to sign in.
We knew McIniss was aware that SAFE Colorado was in town, and an article with my name had already appeared in the news; if I signed in as Brooks Brown, there was no way in hell that he'd talk to us. So I gave a fake name, and said nothing of our being involved with SAFE Colorado.
Unfortunately, someone in McIniss's office recognized me, because they tipped off the Congressman. He in turn called Mike Sprengelmeyer, a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News's Washington bureau. He told Sprengelmeyer that we were trying to perpetuate fraud.
The next morning, we were called into an emergency meeting with the heads of SAFE Colorado. John Head, the organization's attorney, told us we had disgraced them. He said what we had done was unprofessional, and that it wouldn't be condoned by SAFE. They told us to leave immediately. The three of us were given plane tickets, put in a cab, and sent home.
We were angry. Maybe we shouldn't have used a fake name, we thought, but we were honest with McIniss about why we were there. The questions we planned to ask were worthwhile. All we wanted was to finally get McIniss to talk to us, since he'd turned the group down before. Two other representatives we'd contacted were willing to talk to us on camera; we had a legitimate project.
Most of all, we were trying to change something for the other kids in the group. We wanted them to get something out of this trip after all.
David tried to explain our actions to the Rocky Mountain News. “The sad thing here is, the point was lost that we were simply trying to get the Congressman to explain his position,” he said. “Instead, they're seeing this as an excuse to throw out some students who are obviously committed.”
I agreed completely. We had all learned that as long as the jerks are in power, regular people have no influence. I had already learned that lesson from Sheriff Stone; now I had learned it in the halls of Congress. We'd learned it from the people who wouldn't talk to us. We'd learned it from the congressmen who had showed us firsthand how difficult it was to go against the system. We'd seen that money controls everything in Washington. We'd seen that for the individual who wants to bring about change, the political road is one roadblock after another.
I was frustrated. But I wasn't going to give up.
That same summer, I got my first chance to make an impact on the system. That chance came courtesy of filmmaker Michael Moore.
An in-your-face investigator, Moore developed his reputation in the 1980s with his landmark documentary Roger & Me. The movie was about Moore's attempts to meet with Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, in the wake of a major factory closing in Michigan. After that, he worked on investigative-reporting shows like TV Nation and The Awful Truth, while continuing to make documentary films. He has also written two books: Downsize This! and Stupid Wh
ite Men, and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation.
What I liked about Moore was his style. He doesn't play games with people or try to ingratiate himself. He simply tells people what's going on, in a tone with a humorous edge to it.
I first met Moore when he was filming a documentary about guns and youth violence, called Bowling for Columbine. He wanted to know if I would participate. I was more than happy to.
Several months later, I heard from him again. He called me up to say he was making a visit to Kmart's headquarters in Michigan to ask them to stop selling handgun ammunition in their stores. Eric and Dylan had purchased their ammunition at Kmart, so it made sense that Moore asked me if I wanted to come along.
I wasn't the only one; Moore invited two other Columbine students, Richard Castaldo and Mark Taylor, as well. The three of us flew in from Colorado in early June, 2001.
The next morning, we were picked up at the hotel and went straight over to Kmart's headquarters, where we met up with Moore and his film crew. We wanted to meet with the CEO of the company. Instead, Kmart sent down their head of public relations, a guy from buying, and a guy from risk management.
With Moore's cameras rolling, the three of us met with them and told our story. I talked about growing up with Dylan, and my last conversation with Eric. Richard and Mark talked about their injuries; Mark had been shot on the hill outside the school, not far from Richard. Both of them described the years of grueling physical therapy they'd undergone as a result of the shootings.
Both Richard and Mark still have bullets from Kmart lodged in them. Moore reminded the executives of this more than once, referring to my friends as “the Blue Light Special.” Richard and Mark even lifted up their shirts to show their scars to the executives.
Since we were dealing with a corporation, we didn't know what effect, if any, our words would have. Yet the Kmart executives didn't seem to resent our presence. None of them was a typical “corporate stooge.” They listened to us. One even had tears in his eyes as we told our stories.
At the end of our meeting, they told us they weren't going to commit to any decision—basically the response we had expected. We left feeling like we were off to a good start but still had a lot of work ahead of us.
The next morning, Moore called a press conference outside Kmart's headquarters. We figured that we were in for several days of keeping up the pressure on the corporation. After all, if you've ever seen Moore's other work, you know that executives usually ask him to leave, push him out the door, and refuse to speak with him again—and by now, Moore knew how to fight back.
This time, he didn't have to. Less than an hour after we arrived, Kmart announced that they were going to pull all handgun ammunition off their store shelves by the end of September.
We had succeeded.
Kmart claimed that they had been planning this move for months, and that our presentation hadn't had anything to do with the decision; whether that's actually true is subject to debate. But that first day, we showed them that we weren't going to give up. From what we could tell, it had paid off.
For the first time in a long while, I felt positive about the world. First, I had gained so much respect for Kmart. Here was a corporation that went against the norm. Instead of chasing us out, or hitting us with bureaucracy, they'd invited us in, listened to our concerns, and reacted. That impressed the hell out of me. In addition, we had just removed a way for teenage gunmen to acquire ammunition. I don't support gun control, but I do support enforcing the laws we have—and it would be a lot easier for a kid to buy bullets from some teenage clerk at Kmart than from the owner of a gun shop. If closing this avenue discouraged just one potential shooter from imitating Columbine, I considered it a victory.
A victory for the individual, achieved without help from the government or the police. A victory realized not by a committee, but by a filmmaker and three teenagers.
A sign that maybe there was still hope after all.
Working with Michael Moore was an inspiration. He saw problems in the world and took action against them as an individual, in his own way. I wanted to make a contribution as well. Perhaps I could use what I had experienced to make a difference in some way. I knew there were other kids out there who felt lost and alone, just like Eric and Dylan did. I wanted to find them. I wanted to reach out to them before it was too late.
I just had to figure out how.
One of my first inspirations came from music. At a KottonMouth Kings concert in Denver, I encountered a band I'd never heard of before, called Corporate Avenger. Many of their lyrics centered on the injustice of the government and the theft of land from Native American people. In other words, this band was about more than just making music. These guys were interested in making people think. As luck would have it, I ran into a few members of the band after the show, and we got into a long conversation.
We spoke at length about the idea that music had caused Columbine; they felt it was ludicrous. They made it clear that they were artists expressing ideas, but that they weren't advocating violence in any way. In fact, they were committed to opposing violence and fear as a means of imposing thoughts and ideas. They believed in nonviolent expression of thought, and protecting freedom of speech.
I mentioned that I wanted to start some kind of group for society's thinkers—people like us, who wanted to change things through logic and reason rather than force or violence. They told me they would love to be involved in something like that. We talked about using the Internet somehow for that purpose.
I left that night with a new focus. I would try to reach out to the other individuals of the world. The thinkers. The people who wanted to make a difference in society. It was just a matter of deciding how to implement it.
Soon I had an idea.
By now, I had accumulated experience designing Web sites. It occurred to me that I could create a place on the Internet for those who thought outside the norm to share their thoughts with one another. I wanted to give people a chance to see: “Hey, there are other people who are having problems like mine. They think the world sucks just like I do. But they're advocating that we do something to change things, through logic and nonviolent resistance. Hey—maybe there's something to this.”
I named the Web site Little Brother, a reference to George Orwell's 1984. In that book, a government known as “Big Brother” controlled its citizens' every move. I compared that to our government, and chose “Little Brother” to describe a group of concerned citizens, considerably smaller than Big Brother, who are watching the government the same way that the government is watching us.
For the Web address, I chose www.atlasisshrugging.com (now www.atlasisshrugging.org). The first essay I posted on the site presented thought as the enemy of evil:
The arguments evil uses to win are not logic, but feelings. Not hope, but despair. Not reality, but some sort of super-reality that none of us can hope to achieve. But we, the good, use three simple things to prove our points: Reality, truth, and life. We simply want the truth, and we only deal in the truth. We have the chance to take back the world that is rightfully ours.
Don't let them win.
The original Web site was little more than a message board for people interested in philosophy. A person could post his or her thoughts about the world, and I or someone else on the board would respond. Then we would get into a discussion. Sometimes we approached difficult topics, like whether or not the government should retaliate against the Taliban for the September 11, 2001 attacks. It didn't matter what your personal beliefs might be—you signed on to this site to see a million perspectives.
I didn't promote the site at first. I mentioned it to a few of my friends, and asked them to refer anyone who they thought would be interested. When forty different people signed in within a week, I thought, “Shit. Maybe there's something to this.”
For a few months, I left the site alone, to see how it would grow.
In the meantime, I corresponded with a guy who cal
led himself Middle Brother—a brilliant philosopher and a genius at Web page design. He liked the idea behind Little Brother and offered his services to help revamp it. Together, we created new forums and posted philosophical essays on the main page.
A wide variety of posters began arriving: a teenager nicknamed “DeadBoy,” who ranted against the injustice of high school but also preached nonviolence. “Miz,” a free-thinking girl in California. A guy from Iowa who nicknamed himself after Hank Reardon, a key character from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The list kept growing. People wanted to talk. They had a thirst for conversation, for thinking and debating.
We put up a questionnaire for new participants to fill in. I wanted to see where people were coming from and adjust our site's direction accordingly. After all, I don't pretend to have all the answers to society's problems. I simply wanted my site to be a gathering place for those who were dissatisfied with the way things are. By talking through our problems together—and realizing we weren't alone in the world—we were starting something. Who knew where we might go from there?
Ever since it happened, Columbine has maintained a large presence on the Internet. Multiple discussion boards, Web sites, and tribute pages still circulate through cyberspace, and people trade information all the time.
I have mixed feelings about this. Many of the sites have good intentions. There are memorials to the victims, posted so that people will never forget what happened. Other sites are investigative sites, which support the contention that the police are still holding back evidence. Those sites are good to see. They show me that, three years later, people still care. They're still asking questions.
There are some other Columbine-related sites that are a little more . . . well . . . disturbing. I've read conspiracy theories from people who believe Eric and Dylan were part of a government mind-control plot, that they were “brainwashed” to attack Columbine. After all, these conspiracy buffs argue, the government wants guns out of the people's hands, and what better way to do that than stage a “school shooting” so that people get angry and demand gun control? I swear, I'm not making this up.
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