The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [99]
JOY’S CHALLENGE
Because Joy was so inspired, I made compassion the cornerstone of her challenge. When I asked her what she hoped to improve about school, she replied, “I basically want to be able to communicate and connect with people better. I don’t think I’m a negative person, but at times the worst gets the best of us.”
Joy was an incredibly articulate and expressive fourteen-year-old, but I could see what she was getting at. Sometimes she didn’t practice the open-mindedness she preached. This tendency might have been typical for a high school freshman, but Joy prided herself on her ability to look beyond the surface of people, as she put it. So I asked her to give students of various cultures a chance to know her better by breaking the ice with acts of kindness. Eventually, she could work up to giving one of her bullies the opportunity to befriend her—and herself the chance to broaden her network. Joy loved the idea. She happily accepted the challenge.
______
THE “WHO’S MOST LIKELY TO BRING A GUN TO SCHOOL” GAME
Midway through her sophomore year at a Delaware public school, Annmarie, a quiet girl who spent class time writing short stories or drawing chimera-like creatures, told me a secret she had never told anyone else. Well into high school, Annmarie had no friends. Students ridiculed her for her weight, her clothes, her atheism, and her love of literature. They thought she was weird because she watched anime, was obsessed with zombies, and listened to metal instead of rap. There was a time when the ridicule brought Annmarie to her breaking point. Classmates stole her belongings and hid them. A boy in four of her classes called her psycho on a daily basis. “Those were really bad times in my life. No one liked me,” Annmarie said. “But I would dread coming to school because it was always the same thing every day: He would say I was crazy and that I would shoot up the school and try to kill everyone. That was one of the few people I actually wanted to hurt, though I never did.”
I asked her what she meant.
“When you hear that kind of stuff over and over again, it really hurts, and you want just a little bit of vengeance. It was every day for half of the school year and only one person in the class really defended me—my teacher—but it didn’t stop him,” Annmarie answered. “I used to have daydreams in gym class about coming in there with a gun or something and just killing him. Of course, I would never do something like that, but I thought about it, and that was what scared me, so I never told anyone.”
Annmarie’s secret, though she never made plans to act on it, combined with her image at school, could have landed her in a great deal of trouble. In the aftermath of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, in which the student gunmen killed twelve students and a teacher and wounded more than two dozen others before shooting themselves, campus perception of outcasts shifted from objects of derision to potential murderers. Because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wore Goth-like fashion, demonstrated technological sophistication, and were social outcasts, each of those characteristics came to be suspect in other students; the combination became a dreaded stereotype. “We needed to know who was a good guy and who was a bad guy, and nerds and geeks seemed to be mostly in the enemy camp,” psychologist David Anderegg observed. Columbine “changed the world in many ways but one of the most immediate ways was a nationwide persecution of Goths, nerds, geeks, and perceived misfits of all kinds. . . . The nationwide panic that set in after Columbine had all the characteristics of a witch hunt.”
Panicked and pressured to implement politically expedient measures to prevent further massacres, schools mobilized to root out potential killers. Administrators