No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School (20th Anniversary Edition)

by Brooks Brown

When you're younger, and you live in a society like Columbine, you get the feeling that friendship is finite and can be tossed away easily, that starting a friendship with one person means losing friendships with others. Yet you learn through experience that friendship can be infinite.

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.

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 Columbine High School Class of 2002 will graduate. These are the last kids who were there when Eric and Dylan took their revenge. Starting next year, there will be all new students at Columbine—students who have no firsthand memories of hiding in their classrooms, or running away as bullets flew overhead. They will have no memory of seeing friends turn into mass murderers. They will have a clean slate. The Columbine library is gone, demolished nearly two years ago. It's been replaced by an atrium. The place where Rachel Scott was killed is gone, covered up by an entryway that links to the new library. The patch of asphalt where Danny Rohrbough was killed is no longer there; that entire concrete stairway was pulled up and remodeled.

But things are getting better. I've realized something important over the past three years: In spite of the hell that I lived through, I am still alive. I'm one of the lucky ones.

When it comes to Columbine, some solutions are more obvious than others. We have to crack down on all forms of bullying. Obviously, this means the kids on the playground who beat up the outcasts, or the high schoolers who mock and harass the kids wearing black and keeping to themselves. But we also have to look at teachers. Teachers who only like the “good kids” and turn their backs on the rest are causing untold pain and anger in those forgotten students. If students are given up on early, then they learn to hate the system and can no longer be rescued by it.