JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

An Open Letter to Would-Be School Shooters

They deserve it.

Your prison-warden administrators, your collaborationist teachers and the percentage of your fellow students, who, while their parents are the true villains, are nonetheless vicious little shits: Some of them must deserve it, or the thought would never cross your mind.

Of course, nobody will ever tell you that.

Here’s something else they’ll never tell you:

You don’t deserve it.

You didn’t deserve to be dumped into some caveman-culture small town, antiseptic white-room suburb or Soweto-esque inner city. You didn’t deserve to be sentenced to 13 years in a minimum-security prison facetiously called an educational facility for the crime of being born into a world low on babysitters. And you don’t deserve to be gunned down as some Satanized rogue elephant, or to get even more thoroughly institutionalized in another place that also has a cafeteria and a gym and big brick walls, or to be photographed with a borrowed gun in your mouth in a bloody tableau enacting the abnegation the aforementioned pricks have worked so tirelessly to make you feel.

You do not deserve to play your ordained part in this ultimate game of No Matter What You Do, They Win.

I know nothing about you, of course. But I do know school, and that it didn’t start magically generating violence out of thin air only in 1999. On one of those days in high school—after some humiliation, or beating, or unarmed robbery, or insult to my intelligence, or stretch of crushing boredom, or administrative injustice—I swore to myself that I would never forget what school was like. I can’t really say why; maybe it seemed like all the evils of adulthood were founded on them forgetting and us reliving. All I know for sure is that I never forgot (let alone forgave).

I planned to blow up my high school, an idea that still holds merit. And I do mean planned—I knew how to start and maintain the gas leak, and well considered the model-rocket-based time-delay fuse. But then, I never did it. And even if I had, the plan was for it to happen at night, when the building was empty. As much as I hated a lot of people there, I wasn’t looking to kill them. I was looking to kill the place. I thought of it as a gift.

Maybe a time-delay fuse was a great internal metaphor. There were certainly kids around with shorter ones. One was a guy in my driver’s ed class who I shared a few laughs with. He was a special ed kid, but not really overtly disabled, just slightly slow on the uptake and painfully awkward and weird. And poor.

One day, he went home, broke out his hunting rifles, and murdered his family. A neighbor, too. “NOW I’m going out!” he reportedly shouted repeatedly, making an undeniable, if rather obscure, point about chore scheduling.

Here are the two things I really remember about that:

I was grateful that we got the next day off from school.

The first song I ever wrote was about him.

A couple grades later, aspiring to have a punk rock band, I wrote another song. It was called “I’ve Got a Gun in School.”

Like everything else I wrote in the golden year of 1988, it was metrically challenged, incredibly sad and blindingly true. In this particular example from 11 B.C. (Before Columbine), it was also freakishly prescient. Here’s how it went:

Bred for a life so nervous and tense

Spend years sitting as a captive audience

Designed to be well-mannered and tame

They get as immoral as they can to make us all the same

And while twenty heads nod around me

I just kick back and laugh

Gearing up to kick some butt

While they’re kissing ass

Little do they know I’m still awake…

’Cause I’ve had enough!

And I’ve got a gun in school

So say

Fuck the system

Your system fucks me

Fuck you!

I run out to my locker, fling open the door

Gonna blow the force-fed patriotism out of the school store

Loadin’ up the gun with six rounds of lead

Gonna put a bullet through their collective head

The law now twisted into conforming destruction of kids’ rights

They don’t think I have a choice

They’re so used to being sure but it’s gonna be hard to ignore

They’ll hear a forty-four caliber voice

I’ve got a P-38!

’Cause I’ve had enough!

And I’ve got a gun in school

It was inevitable

Killed by the system

I’m a monster the system created

Created by you!

It’s about time your mental cloning came to an end

Homerooms alphabetically choosing my friends

Parents pass the buck: “Kids need guidance,” so school is fair

Program me how to see it before it’s even there

I’ve made my point like they make theirs

Now they overreact in force

I didn’t kill anyone—it was really only a water gun!

They take me down but I’ve planted the seed—they’re a little insecure

And now it’s natural progression, institution to institution

For me it’s just

More of the system

It doesn’t help, it oppresses

Fuck you!

You already failed once to make me what you want

I’ve made people think

So watch for more “abnormalities”

More problem children

Meanwhile chemically torch your Frankenstein

Make your mistake again

Self-righteous to the end but the truth is out

It’s your fault

Your fault

Your flaw…

You’re wrong

Ah, the big twist ending, the ironic title! And it’s true—I really never did have a gun in school. But why not? I had the rage. My family had the guns. I lived walking distance—i.e., no worries about gun-smuggling—from the school. I had a murderous classmate to copycat. It just never happened, like my non-explosion of the school.

Another thing I had was keen knowledge that “they” did indeed deserve it. Top of the list were the three child-molesters. My geography teacher raped one of my friends, I later learned. What I knew then was that he loved to paddle girls (corporal punishment was legal) and humiliate them in front of the class. One of my homeroom teachers showed up with scratches on his face and joked to us that it was from a “werewolf.” He, of course, was the two-faced monster-man, wounded by a victim. He was quietly shuffled off, probably to fresh hunting grounds. The French teacher invited my best friend over to the house for booze and porn. Fortunately, my friend said no; the teacher is still a respected member of the community.

Forget my schoolboy rage. My grown-up instinct still is that feeding these fucks into a woodchipper would be a boon to humanity.

And that’s not the entire list—we can descend from high crimes to misdemeanors that are nonetheless life-wreckers to children. My junior-high principal tried to teach me that I was wrong about my beloved dinosaurs because the Earth is only 6,000 years old; my high-school vice principal was a bully with a billy-club collection in his office. My gym coach had me, at about 110 pounds, play lineman in a football game against actual football team members, bestowing upon me a permanent foot injury. Of course, all three of them at one point told me I had some sort of problem (usually involving the terrible crime of skipping class) that was ruining their brilliant pedagogy. I wish a year of unresponsive-to-morphine terminal bone cancer upon them all.

Nor was my family-shooting classmate the only one to crack and provide a possible source of inspiration. There was Jimmy in junior high, a troubled bully who I nonetheless got along with somehow—one of those classroom-specific quasi-friendships I imagine is pretty close to a cellmate relationship. One day, Jimmy broke into an old woman’s house, raped her and cut off her eyelids.

Then there was Lewis, an acquaintance from my circle of nerds and outcasts. Plans for him to join our D&D game were blown when he went the LARP route instead, taking up his hunting bow with razor-tipped arrows and storming out of the house into the hills, leaving a note proclaiming he was in search of the “elven king.” The implication was that if you intended to disrupt his quest, you had best be wearing an Amulet of Protection from Missile Weapons. I was instructed to lock myself in the house while heavily armed state cops went on the manhunt against the elf-hunt. The elven king got away, but Lewis did not. That was the last I heard of him.

So let’s be objectively clear: I had not only the rage, but the reasons—better ones than our entire country can muster to explain a trillion-dollar international slaughter-fest. And violent psychotic breaks were clearly not rare among my classmates. My only innovation would have been performing the freak-out on school grounds.

Which takes us back to the question: Why didn’t I? I’m not going to bamboozle you—and me—with some simplistic moral so I can turn this into a tough-love lesson like one of those professional ex-gang members. The fact is, I don’t why I didn’t. It actually confuses me. It seems to violate the law of cause and effect.

Here’s my emotional, instinctual answer: Whatever the reasons, they came from the best part of me—the part those fuckers never got to. A part they groped and molested and Indian-rope-burned in those other guys.

You haven’t gone apeshit, either—at least, not yet. Maybe it’s because of the best part of yourself as well—the part you envision protecting by annihilating the threats around you. But then, what do I know?

It feels true for myself, at least, and that makes the reasons worth exploring, especially now that I’m out of the pressure cooker and can examine my psychology at my leisure. If you see some of yourself in my self-indulgent musings, so much the better.

My first thought is that I’m full of shit—I did have violent freak-outs. I thrived on dangerous vandalism. I bullied my brother and neighborhood kids, sometimes terribly and cruelly. I just never did it at school, and never did anything headline-grabbing. I simply brought school home with me, and redirected the rage in smaller ways.

A big reason I never did it at school was because the place didn’t just torment me; it truly had me psychologically broken. I feared for my life and sanity daily. I was terrorized into inaction. Blowing up an empty school was theoretically possible; confrontation with the entire army of villains was unimaginable. And even with my sadistic outbursts, my personal psychology tended mostly toward debilitating depression—avoidant withdrawal, imploded self-esteem, savage self-hatred, paralyzing dread, whipped-dog cowardice, fantasies of safety and power. The biggest crime I got busted for was trying to shoplift—a toy gun. So symbolic, so in tune with my own song.

Even had I been functional, I would have balked at killing. Obviously, there are lots of influences in that regard. The most irreducible is that I always loved animals and actively opposed their pain and torture; somehow, that feeling never went away and bled over into the human species I had much less appreciation for. I’ve often thought that is the one minor character trait, the one box unchecked on the FBI behavioral profile, that kept me from becoming a true monster. I also find it illustrative that of the three freak-out companions aforementioned, two of them were armed with their hunting weapons.

Kids will love the first thing that doesn’t treat them like fools, and typically that is not their school, parents or town (and certainly not their church). It is the sea breeze from the distant shores of pop culture. And so it was for me.

An enormous influence on me was the sitcom “M*A*S*H,” about humane doctors forced by bureaucracy to live amidst insane violence and bloodthirsty goons. Their survival by wit, dark humor and intense principle affected me profoundly. It was the first fiction that felt anything like my life. It taught me patience—wars always end—and the nobility of saying no in the face of hopeless odds.

That was nothing, though, compared to punk rock. The Sex Pistols told me, “Schools Are Prisons.” The Dead Kennedys told me, “You really like gorillas?/We got just the pet for you/It’s the way you’re forced to act/To survive our schools.”

Validation and commiseration have untold power. For years, I had been gaslighted into believing I was a malfunctioning whinger. Now I suddenly knew that thousands of other people felt my pain. It was probably the first time adults had told me the truth about anything significant, or said it made sense to be angry. And it helped turn me away from feeling like a cornered animal toward feeling like an empowered member of a secret resistance.

Back then, being into punk meant writing one’s own punk songs—participating in the self-expression. Let’s face it, one of the biggest reasons I didn’t have a gun in school is because I wrote “I’ve Got a Gun in School.”

Looking back, it’s remarkable how I made such a strong expression of violent anger into a constructive joke, a prank. The gun becomes a water pistol, an effigy of violence. It perfectly sums up the ambiguous mental place I occupied, and the reformist and prankish traits that punk strongly encouraged. It’s written by somebody who believed school could be fixed by the bluff of violence rather than the reality. It’s written by a kid who thought of violence only to end the violence. It’s written by a kid who wanted to be a kid, not a soldier.

It’s interesting to me that none of the horror stories I’ve described here are referred to in the song. The motives for the “shooting” are remarkably vague. But I think they’re also sophisticated. In that time and environment, I wasn’t about to enumerate all my personal threats and humiliations. Instead, I neatly described the conformist brainwashing that is school’s real raison d’etre and the enabler of all of its specific abuses of power and culture of violence. Forced into the role of outsider, I always saw these things with clarity; punk schooled me further in the structures of power. Of course, it also allowed me the comfort of objectifying my pain, hiding how deeply wounded I really felt.

Detachment comes in many forms. One is the kind that lets you shoot peers and strangers. Another is the kind that lets you see the system as a bad magic trick that disappears if you can find another angle, or just wait for it to end. I was fortunate enough to experience the latter. And I do believe it was pure fortune.

In school, I used to only partly joke that the most obvious methods for personal peace were to kill yourself or kill everybody else (with the latter option more appealing). But towards the end, I had another saying: “I’ll never be like them.” That’s still a personal motto, one I struggle to live up to at times, struggle with the consequences of at other times, take pride in most of the time.

Some piece of me was able to say that thanks to the meager defenses of a) knowing I was right and b) knowing they had to let me out after a certain number of years. That tiny armor didn’t deflect all the bullets, but kept enough of them out my heart.

Well, it’s a nice story, anyway. It’s part of whatever the truth is. The scary part is how random the identifiable factors were.

My story might mean shit to you. There are lots of other things, like neo-Nazism, that might validate a kid’s anger and intelligence in ways I would consider only additionally destructive. I saw some of that firsthand, too. Or there might be no life preserver at all, just submersion in cold depths. Or maybe anger and intelligence aren’t what a kid needs validated; maybe they struggle with a learning “disability,” or can’t figure out their (or anyone’s) sexuality, or are going home to a child molester, or a million other special circumstances glossed over by mechanized education and our sticky stereotypes of what kids are supposed to be.

I’m a believer in details and can only speak for the way it went down for me. So it’s also important that, besides crowing about how right I was, I talk about what I got wrong.

“They’ll hear a forty-four caliber voice…They’re a little insecure…I’ve made people think.” Such were my imagined outcomes of my fantasy school shooting, and, I think, the rationales behind many real ones. There’s certainly an echo of it in my classmate’s “NOW I’m going out!”

I was wrong about that, and so are shooters.

Sure, they’ll hear the Big Bang and freak out. It will be horrible and shocking terrorism. It might inspire another killing somewhere else.

But it’s not going to change anything or make anyone think. Just look at the record. The biggest change in public education since Columbine is the imposition of even more standardized testing. At most, a shooting will just spread the hopeless despair, the message that there’s no way to win, just a gory way to lose.

Nothing will change because unlike effective political terrorism, shooting up your school is not a protest against a higher power; it is simply a darker reflection of its power trip and a reinforcement of its already low opinion of your outcast kind. They will loathe the method but enjoy the result—you disappear into nothingness or a cell, another bump sanded smooth. Outrage over the spectacle of a dozen violent deaths will only further cover the system’s destruction of hundreds of lives by much quieter and smaller evils.

The adults will fight like mad to not blame themselves, and they’ll succeed. If 25 schools around the country all blew up accidentally in the same way, we’d be tearing them apart, searching for the common material failure. But 25 school shootings will be magically scented as rogue blossoms of singular bad seeds. The school that failed you so badly will never be blamed. They’d rather search your iPod for culprits instead.

“Killed by the system…Natural progression, institution to institution…More of the system.” Those are much truer lines, and the real outcomes. The system will finally put the final squeeze on you with a SWAT bullet, or it will jail you even more formally. Either way, you’ll merely prove it correct and just.

I know—who cares about prison; you’re already in prison. Well, here’s the difference—today, you’re on a limited sentence. One day, you can walk out of the place. Your adult wardens won’t. They’ll live in their own little hell for years to come, while you finally choose whether to see any of your fellow prisoners ever again. I know your youth feels like a power-draining curse, but it’s your biggest weapon—deadlier than any gun. Hate your teachers and administrators? Odds are you’ll outlive them. You’ll have the opportunity to dance on their graves if you want to, rather than lying in a nearby plot.

I’m not saying that serving out the sentence is a simple solution. Afterward, you may live with the effects of your hideous school every day, like I do. You might be drawn to stories of innocent people sent to jail, or have lingering prison-style habits like trouble making eye contact, like I do. But you will have choices, options and a lifestyle that is not fundamentally constructed around subservience and lowest common denominators. Life doesn’t get easier, but it does get different.

In the meantime, it means taking shit. It means shooting old car doors in the woods instead of fellow classmates. It means doing crazy pranks instead of violent crimes. If you really want to shock people, spend your sentence running a Web site documenting the violence, stupidity and meanness of your school. Breaking minds is a lot more fun than breaking bodies.

If you go the other way, let’s be honest about it. You’ll probably kill a lot of people who don’t deserve it, out of blind rage, or because it’s easier to get the weakest victims, or because you’ve come to despise everyone. And that is not beating the system—it is becoming the system.

Let’s get back to things nobody ever says. When I was in school, I was a victim—day in, day out, multiple times per day, of people who deserved to be blown up. But when I went home and bullied kids—I deserved it. I probably still do.

Likewise, if you go and shoot a bunch of people, you’ll deserve it. And I’d be the first to put a bullet through you to stop it.

The Pistols were right that schools are prisons, but the macho adult analogy hides a more painful truth: Schools are child abuse. Like all abuse, they are self-perpetuating cycles of disease. School shootings are spectacular, but nothing special, just another recycling job of 50 percent post-consumer violence. Yep, I’m preaching that you break the cycle, refuse to participate or give in. But not because it’s The Right Thing To Do. I propose it to you as a form of hope.

Right now you are probably already anticipating another dreary day of inescapable bullies, morons and similar evils. Hopelessness is like an endless gray rain that never washes anything off. In my experience, every day you manage not to snap is an adventure in hope; and unlike religious brands, a kind that almost certainly will be fulfilled. I never thought about it as hope, of course—I wish I had—but I knew that if I just kept my head down for the day-by-day grind, the ticking clock was in my favor. What you can hope for is what I got—that I was still myself at the end of it, not a despised puppet. And standing on the other side of that graduation ceremony where they mispronounced my name, I can say that it is far more satisfying to leave my former prison-mates behind as powerless irrelevancies than it would have been to have them simply dead or morally self-righteous—and them still holding power over me or my memory either way. I can tell you that you’re already right and have already won—you just have to wait until the day after Graduation Day to receive the prize, a lifetime gift that will keep on giving.

There are so many bastards who deserve it—too many to name, too many to kill, no matter how long your secret notebook list. Let’s be straight about it. Become a self-loathing destroyer of kids, and you belong on that list alongside the rest of them.

I’m suggesting something much harder, something that seems to make no sense—that you ride this wave of pain, that you hold your position with shaky balance. I’m suggesting that the only way you win is by staying the person who didn’t ask for any of this in the first place; the person who wants to lash out to protect something precious inside; the person you are right now, not the un-person you would be the second after pulling a trigger.

You don’t deserve it.

So don’t deserve it.

Posted Nov. 4, 2007.

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