Columbine, Five Years Out

Terrific article on Slate about the Columbine killers.

The Depressive and the Psychopath
At last we know why the Columbine killers did it.
By Dave Cullen

. . .

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand "the killers," quit asking what drove them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions. . . .

And much more.

(no subject)

bruceb keeps turning up with great links I see nowhere else.

Today, he linked to a great essay on what it's like to be chronically ill, using spoons as a metaphor.

At that moment, the spoon theory was born. I quickly grabbed every spoon on the table; hell I grabbed spoons off of the other tables. I looked at her in the eyes and said "Jenni, here you go, you have Lupus." She looked at me slightly confused, as anyone would when they are being handed a bouquet of spoons. The cold metal spoons clanked in my hands, as I grouped them together and shoved them into her hands. I explained that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices, or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn't have to.

Since bruceb himself suffers from chronic illness, I take his recommendation of it quite seriously.