Savages (Landon)

"Only certain people can commit atrocities, right?" I posed this question in front of a crowd of high school students. Some shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Others looked at each other. "Think again. That was me as a kid. Do you think he looks like a mass murderer? Do I look like that you now? Well, this was me." I played footage of the shooting. My stomach turned as it played, but I knew it was necessary. I don't know exactly what went wrong, whether it was genetic or environmental or both, but I know that it was something. If every depressed, overwhelmed high schooler went on a killing spree, we'd all be dead.

Of course, combat programs haven't been the same since then. Some students have to store their weapons in lockers. Others need to be screened to enter their schools' combat programs. Some schools ban enchanted weapons specifically while others did away with their combat programs entirely. On the other side of the coin, some schools became increasingly combat-oriented at the expense of core subjects. If I learned anything, I learned that violence clouds the mind, but not in the way that some people think it does.

The reason that Havencraft High School no longer reads or shows Macbeth is that I had the lead role shortly before the shooting. It's a good play, one that can work with a variety of stagings and interpretations, but the question now is: Could people see the dagger before my eyes or could they not? In other words, did people really try to understand me or am I just another prop that is used to generate sensationalism?

The Mindcrack suicide crisis didn't get nearly as much attention as any mass killing even though, in my mind, it was just as horrific. Why? People can't politicize suicide the way they can politicize a shooting, stabbing, or bombing. Our inclination to point fingers and take sides is a vestige one of the most basic instincts: to assemble in herds as a means of survival. Though most of us try to be "civilized" by wearing shirts and going along with various social norms, we will always have those remnants of those raw, untamed animal instincts.

A part of me thinks that we would be better able to empathize with each other if we stopped thinking of every little thing as "good" or "evil" and recognize that, underneath it all, we're all scared and trying to survive. We're just savages, but we don't admit it. It's not that we stopped killing or hurting others for its own sake, just that we developed more efficient and sneaky ways to do it. High school is generally when we realize this and, thus, I find it important to tell my story to high schoolers.

Even though they had just eaten lunch, they listened attentively, taking everything in like sponges. It is my hope that they walk out as better people, but a simple presentation can't do that. Inherently, people have the capacity for both good and evil, but most of the time we don't know which is which.