watch lists

Years after graduating from high school, Shawn told me that he and I—along with god knows how many other kids—had been wedged onto our high school’s pre-Columbine, pre-9/11 “terrorist” watch list. I never even knew this list existed. Whether its intention was to keep an eye on potential mass murderers or to flag us as students who needed to be “saved” (ie, squeezed into the common mold, helped to conform, etc.) remains a mystery.

If the former is true, I can roll my eyes and laugh at the whole thing. Me, potentially dangerous? I’m a vegetarian who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Literally! When I get a fly in my apartment, I open up all the windows and doors and try to shoo him out. I’ve got a humane bug vacuum at work and whenever I encounter wasps or ants in my department, I suck them up and release them outside. Even after one of the wasps stung me, I still released him. And I’m constantly badgering my friends and family to avoid killing household mice with barbaric snap/glue traps and instead use a humane trap to capture them and release them outside. How could they think that someone like me was possibly going to, like, kick in the front door of my high school and let loose with a machine gun? I may not have liked 90% of the student body, and I may have smiled at the thought of horrific things happening to some of them, but I’m no killer. So putting me on that list was a bit misguided, to say the least.

If the latter is true, then I’m offended! I mean, okay, I’ve been out of high school for 14 years, so it’s not like I’m sitting here with my veins still pulsating in rage over the fact that my high school thought I needed to be Stepfordized. That was a long time ago, after all. But it’s still offensive, because despite my clinical depression and all my teen angst (and there was a lot of it, y’all!), I was a good kid. With the exception of math and science (my weakest subjects), my grades were excellent. I participated in school clubs and was involved in the school musical every year. I was on the yearbook staff. I wrote for the school newspaper and literary magazine. I entered a Voice of Democracy essay contest, for chrissake. I was quiet, docile, obedient. I never skipped class. I always did my homework. I didn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or have sex. I didn’t throw wild parties or date-rape my peers. There was one incident involving a German workbook that landed two friends and me in in-school suspension for a day, but…ahem…we won’t get into that here. With the exception of that unfortunate incident, I think the worst thing I did within the confines of the school was get into trouble with my 9th grade Honors English teacher for reading an issue of Royalty Monthly during a screening of Romeo and Juliet. Ooooh…wicked!

My crime was being too quiet, too sad-looking, and having dyed-black hair and a penchant for wearing black clothes. (I didn’t wear them all the time, mind you, because my access to an extensive black wardrobe was limited in my hometown.) My friends and I were sweetly dorky and smart, and we had dark, inappropriate senses of humor and creative flair, and that’s what made us suspicious. Not to mention the fact that we didn’t go out of our way to fit in. We were all such good kids, and we didn’t overtly try to be rebellious nonconformists or anything, but we also made little-to-no effort to fit in. We just kind of did our own thing, pigeon-holing be damned.

There’s a quote I love: “The opposite of conformity isn’t nonconformity—it’s indifference to the fact.” That’s how we operated, I guess—by simply not caring about how the game was played and how we could try harder at playing it. We weren’t easily categorized and labeled. We slid through the cracks of the social strata. This vexed and downright infuriated some of the teachers and students, I’m sure, but we didn’t care. We’d found our own magic. And that, apparently, is the biggest crime you can commit in the high school universe: thumbing your nose at the status quo. Not trying to break it down, but simply not caring.

And so it bugs me that the authorities could look at someone like me and deign me as being in need of social salvation. I was a well-behaved, academically-inclined student who had well-behaved, academically-inclined friends. I didn’t need social salvation.

Some authorities undoubtedly think these watch lists are beneficial, especially in this post-Columbine world of ours. And yeah, it’s true that a kid could go apeshit at any moment and wage a killing spree in the halls. And it’s true that perhaps this kid could’ve been stopped if people had been paying more attention to his state of crisis. But is dabbing a scarlet letter on loners and miserable-looking kids really a reasonable response? Will it actually change anything? I was on my school’s watch list, but no one ever said anything to me about it. No one ever recommended me for counseling or asked me how I was feeling. No one ever asked if they could do anything to make me feel better. No one ever applauded me for being unafraid to do my own thing, to not kow-tow to the pressures of conformity. They just watched me with distain from afar. If I had been planning mass murder, simply being on a watch list wouldn’t have stopped me!

What we need is a better climate of tolerance in schools. Kids will be kids—there will always be a shitload of barbarians and bullies in each school, and an overwhelming culture of conformity. But perhaps there wouldn’t be as many if schools taught children, from the very beginning, not to spurn uniqueness. And teachers should know better than to target kids for being different. Unfortunately, some of the teachers in my school didn’t. They worshipped the jocks and preps and ignored the rest of us. They didn’t try to encourage uniqueness or creativity. They didn’t compliment us on our individualism. They either ignored us or tsk-tsk-tsked at us. Or they automatically thought of us as being a threat. And that’s the kind of abhorrent behavior that merits a watch list!

Cultivating acceptance and tolerance wouldn’t completely eradicate the problem of kids shooting up their schools, but I really do believe—and not in an unrealistic Pollyanna way—that it could greatly minimize this threat. No matter what you do, you can’t weed out every psychopath, can’t stave off every homicidal nervous breakdown. But wouldn’t students be less likely to mow down their peers in a hail of bullets if those peers had always treated them with respect? If they didn’t torment them, try to minimize them, or cast them in the role of outcast freak just because they didn’t fit into a standardized mold? If students were just as supportive of their classmates’ artistic and academic abilities as they were of their other classmates’ athletic and social abilities? It just seems like fostering an atmosphere of tolerance would be more effective than sticking kids on a pseudo-terrorist watch list.

Or maybe I’m simply grasping at straws here.




song heard most recently before posting: Black—Pearl Jam