25 Years After Columbine: A Look Back at Life & the National Mood

Twenty-five years ago, my name first appeared in publication. I had gone to a special meeting at the local Baptist church where youth were encouraged to talk about what had happened at Columbine, and the local newspaper reporter quoted me saying something wrongheaded but grammatically correct. It was some tripe about how it’s easier to change hearts than laws. (I managed to be wrong both on the human condition and on the operation of legislatures.) Although I liked and respected the pastors involved, the event in my memory veered toward the mawkish and then the exploitative. Was it lax gun control? Violent video games? Marilyn Manson? What was to blame for those bombs and shootings in Colorado? Proximate explanations at best, distractions from the truth at worse. Of course it was the primordial evil in men’s hearts. And now that the teens are getting so conveniently, emotionally vulnerable about their mortality, let’s time the altar call correctly.

I had just turned 17 and was possessed by an utterly delusional teenage confidence. Shy in early childhood, I had made a success of our family’s move to Putnam County in New York. By my freshman year, my older friends drove me wherever I wanted to go. An under-the-table job with illegal-for-kids hours at a deli and grocer had me constantly flush with cash, by teen standards. I had, as a junior, achieved my goal of becoming editor in chief of the school’s literary magazine (still one of my most prestigious postings). I found schoolwork easy, and treated anything outside of English and history with disdain, allowing my cleverness to breed laziness and inattention, leading to occasional academic criminality. I recruited friends into the swing-dancing revival fad. I had a yearslong reputation as not being a trouble-maker, which paradoxically then allowed me to walk the halls of the school during the schooldays with total impunity. Fresh off a break-up with a long-term (for that age) girlfriend, I would skip classes I found boring and go flirt with teachers I liked. In a few weeks, I would turn in a floppy disc of 30 corrupted files as my year of “lab work” so I could sit for the chemistry final. I knew my teacher and the New York State Board of Regents would never check.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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Twenty-five years ago, my name first appeared in publication. I had gone to a special meeting at the local Baptist church where youth were encouraged to talk about what had happened at Columbine, and the local newspaper reporter quoted me saying something wrongheaded but grammatically correct. It was some tripe about how it’s easier to change hearts than laws. (I managed to be wrong both on the human condition and on the operation of legislatures.) Although I liked and respected the pastors involved, the event in my memory veered toward the mawkish and then the exploitative. Was it lax gun control? Violent video games? Marilyn Manson? What was to blame for those bombs and shootings in Colorado? Proximate explanations at best, distractions from the truth at worse. Of course it was the primordial evil in men’s hearts. And now that the teens are getting so conveniently, emotionally vulnerable about their mortality, let’s time the altar call correctly.

I had just turned 17 and was possessed by an utterly delusional teenage confidence. Shy in early childhood, I had made a success of our family’s move to Putnam County in New York. By my freshman year, my older friends drove me wherever I wanted to go. An under-the-table job with illegal-for-kids hours at a deli and grocer had me constantly flush with cash, by teen standards. I had, as a junior, achieved my goal of becoming editor in chief of the school’s literary magazine (still one of my most prestigious postings). I found schoolwork easy, and treated anything outside of English and history with disdain, allowing my cleverness to breed laziness and inattention, leading to occasional academic criminality. I recruited friends into the swing-dancing revival fad. I had a yearslong reputation as not being a trouble-maker, which paradoxically then allowed me to walk the halls of the school during the schooldays with total impunity. Fresh off a break-up with a long-term (for that age) girlfriend, I would skip classes I found boring and go flirt with teachers I liked. In a few weeks, I would turn in a floppy disc of 30 corrupted files as my year of “lab work” so I could sit for the chemistry final. I knew my teacher and the New York State Board of Regents would never check.