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Once upon a time...
(taking a cold addled break after napping for most of the evening...)
When I was in middle school, I made plans to blow up the school. Okay, *we* made plans to blow up the school, my closest friends and I. Very careful, elaborate ones. And we had explosives, or at least access to explosives -- some we made for ourself (having more or less free run of the chem lab), some were purchased by the older brother of my best friend for use in making fireworks. Oh, and I sometimes brought weapons to school. I remember in particular a knife that I'd occaisionally wear in a homemade arm sheath, and the shuriken I'd contrived to hide in my shoe.
Don't get me wrong, we were all "good" kids. All of us in orchestra (including my other closest friend, who wore a massive survival knife strapped to her thigh under her frumpy black skirts), all of us in the gifted program, most of us on the honor roll... We weren't in trouble, either, not in the usual ways. In just one year three kids got suspended for trying to beat me up. (Certainly not all the ones who made the effort.) I did not. Why? Because I didn't fight back. (I'm not, in retrospect really saying this made me either a pacifist or a wimp. I think I knew there was a line I didn't want to cross, right then... But at that time, words were the only weapons that came that readily to my hand. So maybe it just didn't occur to me.) Our parents might have thought we were weird, but I think they were more likely to be slightly embarrassed about us, or worried that we were depressed, than worried that we were up to something horrible.
It was a very fucked up school, with riots every Martin Luther King day while I was there. Apparently it wasn't going to get better -- a boy I'd known took to bringing a gun to school after he started at the highschool we were all expected to attend just to get people to leave him alone. Another honor roll student, bright guy... (don't know where he ended up, actually). This probably why a bit after all of this, when someone said "why don't you come to the university and take 20 credit hours under a sadistic set of instructors with a bunch of other neurotic overachievers" is sounded like a good plan. Avoiding highschool sounded like a very good plan. My teachers had already made it clear that they didn't particularly want me to come back after seventh grade. (I've mentioned before that no one ends up liking it if I'm bored, haven't I? I wasn't trying to make trouble, though, which seems kind of sad in retrospect.)
How do I describe the bunch of us? Nerds, of course. This was the mid eighties, and none of us particularly thought we could count on the world lasted until we were adults. Loyal to eachother -- which almost goes without saying, and yet it also doesn't. In some ways I think I can see the kind of tight knit tribe emerging from those friendships, the kind of thing that has characterized a lot of the social circles we grew up to be. Having eachother helped. But we were pretty typical alienated teens. Overly bright, the lot of us, but I don't think really that remarkable.
The flirtation with violence was just another, slightly desperate sort of game. Like the D&D, like the hacking, some attempt to distract and amuse ourselves, some attempt to feel like we mattered, or like we could do *something* that mattered. Some idea that we could put aside the whimpy smart, well behaved personas and have secrets, maybe. I think I was at my most depressed in my life when I was in fourth grade, because then I was so isolated. But I was the most desperate when I was twelve. Disenfranchised? Something like that. Pathetic, isn't it? How we romanticize the sweet young things. And how privledged I was, in so many ways. And yet I remember my own misery so clearly.
Anyhow, life went on. Around that time I started getting interested in ceremonial magic, which was a good focus for my energy. (And gave me another tight knit group of people.) Not long after that, I left the public schools first to go to college, then back briefly to attend a particularly Marxist private school, then back to college and the rest of my rather convoluted formal education. Oh, and a number of us started putting out a science fiction magazine, and so on and so forth. Studying latin, calligraphy, dressmaking, magical theory, herbalism, writing papers, etc. etc. did a pretty good job of keeping me out of trouble (and of course my friends and I could always sneak off at night and try to summon a demon if we were overwhelmed by angst. Scaring eachother silly usually set that quite to rights...) I was also spending several hours a day playing piano, and that was a good thing too.
But a week or two ago I heard about a man getting arrested and indeed convicted because they found in his house what were claimed to be plans for placing explosives throughout his city, and what were identified as bomb making supplies. Now I don't know a whole lot about this guy. He was a frequent, and fairly cogent (all things considered) contributor to white supremecist discussions online. (Though his father, IIRC, was black.)
But from what I heard of his case, in terms of actual crimes (with the possible exception of hate speech, and I'm just not going there for the moment) he had done no more than we had. He was arrested and convicted on the basis of his perceived intent to commit a crime.
Intent is a very slippery thing. We never hurt anyone. Nor did we intend to. (Okay, I must fess up, our plans to blow up the school even included a whole set of provisions to make sure we didn't blow up any people -- the building itself was the target of our ire. Even now, some part of my brain insists we would have been doing the world a favor...) For us the exercise, the planning, even our experiments with explosives, were an end in itself. Another way or reminding ourselves that even if no on else knew it, we were a force to be reckoned with, and we could endure a little longer.
(The closest thing to carrying any of this out was when the step brother of one of my friends -- who was not himself really "one of us" -- smoked a bunch of pot one weekend, climbed up the external wall to the school, across the roof, and down into the courtyard, broke into the computer lab, stole a commodore PET computer, and hid it in his locker. And then bragged about it in school. We were so embarrassed to even know him...)
I don't remember how much of our plans we committed to paper. I don't know how much it's still like that in those school. I can just imagine what would have happened had we been doing this all now, and any of it came to light.
Yeah, we were just kids. I don't know how much that would have protected us.
("They were loners," I can here them saying. Yup, the lot of us. Together.)
When I was in middle school, I made plans to blow up the school. Okay, *we* made plans to blow up the school, my closest friends and I. Very careful, elaborate ones. And we had explosives, or at least access to explosives -- some we made for ourself (having more or less free run of the chem lab), some were purchased by the older brother of my best friend for use in making fireworks. Oh, and I sometimes brought weapons to school. I remember in particular a knife that I'd occaisionally wear in a homemade arm sheath, and the shuriken I'd contrived to hide in my shoe.
Don't get me wrong, we were all "good" kids. All of us in orchestra (including my other closest friend, who wore a massive survival knife strapped to her thigh under her frumpy black skirts), all of us in the gifted program, most of us on the honor roll... We weren't in trouble, either, not in the usual ways. In just one year three kids got suspended for trying to beat me up. (Certainly not all the ones who made the effort.) I did not. Why? Because I didn't fight back. (I'm not, in retrospect really saying this made me either a pacifist or a wimp. I think I knew there was a line I didn't want to cross, right then... But at that time, words were the only weapons that came that readily to my hand. So maybe it just didn't occur to me.) Our parents might have thought we were weird, but I think they were more likely to be slightly embarrassed about us, or worried that we were depressed, than worried that we were up to something horrible.
It was a very fucked up school, with riots every Martin Luther King day while I was there. Apparently it wasn't going to get better -- a boy I'd known took to bringing a gun to school after he started at the highschool we were all expected to attend just to get people to leave him alone. Another honor roll student, bright guy... (don't know where he ended up, actually). This probably why a bit after all of this, when someone said "why don't you come to the university and take 20 credit hours under a sadistic set of instructors with a bunch of other neurotic overachievers" is sounded like a good plan. Avoiding highschool sounded like a very good plan. My teachers had already made it clear that they didn't particularly want me to come back after seventh grade. (I've mentioned before that no one ends up liking it if I'm bored, haven't I? I wasn't trying to make trouble, though, which seems kind of sad in retrospect.)
How do I describe the bunch of us? Nerds, of course. This was the mid eighties, and none of us particularly thought we could count on the world lasted until we were adults. Loyal to eachother -- which almost goes without saying, and yet it also doesn't. In some ways I think I can see the kind of tight knit tribe emerging from those friendships, the kind of thing that has characterized a lot of the social circles we grew up to be. Having eachother helped. But we were pretty typical alienated teens. Overly bright, the lot of us, but I don't think really that remarkable.
The flirtation with violence was just another, slightly desperate sort of game. Like the D&D, like the hacking, some attempt to distract and amuse ourselves, some attempt to feel like we mattered, or like we could do *something* that mattered. Some idea that we could put aside the whimpy smart, well behaved personas and have secrets, maybe. I think I was at my most depressed in my life when I was in fourth grade, because then I was so isolated. But I was the most desperate when I was twelve. Disenfranchised? Something like that. Pathetic, isn't it? How we romanticize the sweet young things. And how privledged I was, in so many ways. And yet I remember my own misery so clearly.
Anyhow, life went on. Around that time I started getting interested in ceremonial magic, which was a good focus for my energy. (And gave me another tight knit group of people.) Not long after that, I left the public schools first to go to college, then back briefly to attend a particularly Marxist private school, then back to college and the rest of my rather convoluted formal education. Oh, and a number of us started putting out a science fiction magazine, and so on and so forth. Studying latin, calligraphy, dressmaking, magical theory, herbalism, writing papers, etc. etc. did a pretty good job of keeping me out of trouble (and of course my friends and I could always sneak off at night and try to summon a demon if we were overwhelmed by angst. Scaring eachother silly usually set that quite to rights...) I was also spending several hours a day playing piano, and that was a good thing too.
But a week or two ago I heard about a man getting arrested and indeed convicted because they found in his house what were claimed to be plans for placing explosives throughout his city, and what were identified as bomb making supplies. Now I don't know a whole lot about this guy. He was a frequent, and fairly cogent (all things considered) contributor to white supremecist discussions online. (Though his father, IIRC, was black.)
But from what I heard of his case, in terms of actual crimes (with the possible exception of hate speech, and I'm just not going there for the moment) he had done no more than we had. He was arrested and convicted on the basis of his perceived intent to commit a crime.
Intent is a very slippery thing. We never hurt anyone. Nor did we intend to. (Okay, I must fess up, our plans to blow up the school even included a whole set of provisions to make sure we didn't blow up any people -- the building itself was the target of our ire. Even now, some part of my brain insists we would have been doing the world a favor...) For us the exercise, the planning, even our experiments with explosives, were an end in itself. Another way or reminding ourselves that even if no on else knew it, we were a force to be reckoned with, and we could endure a little longer.
(The closest thing to carrying any of this out was when the step brother of one of my friends -- who was not himself really "one of us" -- smoked a bunch of pot one weekend, climbed up the external wall to the school, across the roof, and down into the courtyard, broke into the computer lab, stole a commodore PET computer, and hid it in his locker. And then bragged about it in school. We were so embarrassed to even know him...)
I don't remember how much of our plans we committed to paper. I don't know how much it's still like that in those school. I can just imagine what would have happened had we been doing this all now, and any of it came to light.
Yeah, we were just kids. I don't know how much that would have protected us.
("They were loners," I can here them saying. Yup, the lot of us. Together.)