It's in the Photograph

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on Columbine High School in 1999, most Americans were horrified. How had it happened here? Could it happen again? How—when—had the disaffected turned dangerous? In high schools everywhere, these questions seemed especially immediate; the tragedy occasioned painful soul-searching.

Except in my high school. At my high school, we knew how to confront disaster! One bright spring day, we all filed out to the football field after school. A teacher had placed fluorescent cones from the field house in a big rectangle to represent Colorado. (In retrospect, it seems fortunate that the tragedy did not occur in, say, Hawaii.) We all jostled into the outline. Taking direction from someone standing in the bleachers, a group of athletes in bright-red varsity jackets clustered in a heart shape in the center of the crowd. They were supposed to represent the bereaved Littleton. We stood there until an aerial photograph was taken. We sent prints of the photograph to Colorado, and for weeks afterward felt awfully proud of the depth of our sympathy.

Having successfully repressed much of my high school experience, I’d managed to go several years without thinking about that aerial photograph. Last week, though, I was forcibly reminded of it. As part of a get-out-the-youth-vote drive, a couple of well-intentioned seniors arranged for everyone in Winthrop House to wear T-shirts that said “I Decide” on Wednesday. We’d then march to the Weeks Footbridge to take a photograph of us massed there, thus reminding everyone of the importance of the youth vote. Also, more T-shirts would be sent to Penn State. There were posters all over Winthrop House, and lots of posts to the house e-mail list.

“This is totally fascist!” I hissed at my roommates on Tuesday night, as they tried on the T-shirts we’d been door-dropped.

“What? What are you talking about?” they said, with the easy superiority of those who have both new t-shirts and a grasp of basic concepts in government.

“And what’s more, it’s an insidious fascism. Because, look, there’s the suggestion of the importance of the individual—‘I Decide.’ But really, the individual is subjugated to the movement—”

“You’re insane.”

“You’ll be singing a different tune, such as ‘The Guns of Brixton,’ when they come for you at night. In jackboots,” I said darkly, but they’d stopped listening to me.

I continued to expound upon my I-Decide-as-fascism theory when we convened the next afternoon before walking (“marching”) down to the footbridge.

“Look—uniforms! Chanting! Banners! Fresh-faced young people! What are those if not warning signs of fascism?”

“You’re wearing fascist socks.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

Despite my reservations, I “marched” to the footbridge: peer pressure is a powerful force. Trying to defend the moral high ground, though, I stood at a little distance from the crowd once we got to the bridge. Also, I wasn’t wearing a T-shirt and would have spoiled the pictures. They stood there in their matching T-shirts, clustered together to have a picture taken, and then broke apart again. They dangled a banner off the footbridge at the boats chuffing by on the Charles. They chanted a little more. And then—because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do—we all drifted back towards Winthrop House to have dinner.

I realized, walking back, that my charges of fascism had been a little hysterical. Actually, the whole affair reminded me of nothing so much as that spring afternoon on the football field five years ago. The problem now, as then, was not motive: there were enough good intentions on the Weeks Footbridge and on my high school’s Leo Shields Football Field to cover the road from here to Hell in asphalt several times over. The problem was that we were window-dressing. The problem was the vague sense of self-satisfaction that hovered over us on the football field and on the bridge. There is a sort of grief that is too deep, and there are problems that are too vast, to be solved with a photograph.

And it’s the sense of self-satisfaction that blinds us to this, and that prevents us from being more constructive. Copies of the photograph of us on the football field hung, curling, from bulletin boards for years; I suspect that copies of the photograph of Winthrop House arrayed on the footbridge will share a similar fate.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column normally appears on alternate Mondays.