Connection to History, Part III

Reference Point:
Toppo, Greg. "10 years later, the real story behind Columbine". USA Today magazine
Find it, read it, and judge for yourself, all here.

This is one of the things I dislike most. Historical events and personas are so often maligned because, sadly, someone started a rumor or just passed one on and on and down through time and memory.


For instance, the much-played up "first Thanksgiving of America" never actually happened. The governor of the colony, William Bradford, wrote Of Plymouth Colony (a portion of which can be found here, although unfortunately not the portion with which we are concerned) and nowhere in the first year or so does he make mention of a great gathering to give thanks- let alone one in peace between the Native Americans and colonists, who coexisted in an uneasy truce.

In the same vein, I have to wonder if Henry Wadsworth Longfellow intended to perpetuate such a falsity or simply attract attention to an overlooked event he believed pertinent to America's people and its history. Paul Revere's Ride (a massively inaccurate, and yet hugely popular, poem from the 1800s, a copy of which can be found here, although if "...on the eighteenth of April in '75..." sounds familiar, you've probably already read it) is so far off-track it isn't even funny. First of all, two other riders rode that night. Second of all, Revere was caught by the British and sent home in disgrace less than halfway through the ride.

To use an example that is unfortunately much closer to our time and more familiar to us, one word: Columbine. Columbine High School and the Columbine shootings have become embedded in the national consciousness, a reminder of what could happen and a symbol of something that had become all-too-common in our society.
Sadly, most of the "facts" we have come to know about the events at Columbine, in the past years are wrong, according to Mr. Toppo. A re-revealing of evidence and more objective studying of the facts, such as the shooters' journals and other forensically conclusive evidence, reveals facts contrary to popular "knowledge", such as:

1. The shooters were actually bullies; not so much the bullied ones.
2. The plan was not to kill specific people using guns; it was a plan to kill as many as possible, possibly over a thousand people, using guns and bombs.
3. The shooters were not righteous victims of a school and parental system gone wrong; one was actually an intelligent, "psychopathic" predator with a megalomaniacal view of the world (Eric Harris, who conceived the plan) and the other was a "suicidal,... lovelorn" individual with a incredible paranoia (Dylan Kleblod).

While the last is surely one of the most horrible tragedies, it truly irritates me that what we as a society accept as "fact" can, in fact, turn out to be so far from the truth it's not even funny any more.

L.P.