Oprah Magazine runs important essay by Susan Kliebold

On this posting about the Oprah Winfrey show, I’ll shift to the Oprah Magazine. I see that it has regular columns from Suze Orman and Dr. Phil, and the November 2009 Dr. Phil article has a welcome piece about dealing with bullies at school.

But the main matter of interest is the essay by Susan Kliebold, mother of Dylan Kliebold, ten years after Columbine. The essay is titled “I will never know why” and appears online at this link.

Dylan seems to have been a gifted child in grade school, and excelled in chess. He gradually went off track later as he got into the high school years. Other reports, as I recall, dealt with being bullied or perceived as “different”. I can recall a dark period in my own thoughts, 45+ years ago, at around age 20 or so (I never say much about it online, for good reason), a couple years after my own college expulsion and NIH psychiatric treatment, and in a broad sense the material in Susan’s essay rings true, although the details are different. One factor in my history is a period of social ostracism, a recovery of social standing (in my case, as a senior in high school) and then loss of social opportunity because of the mishandled expulsion. It is the loss and resulting social deprivation that precipitates such thoughts, I think.

The essay also discusses Dylan’s journals and writings, which at a certain level sound like they somewhat resembled Cho’s in the Virginia Tech tragedy. Like Cho’s, it sounds as though they were never posted online in the public Internet, which in 1999 would have been easy and at that time search engines would have found them easily. Instead, as with Cho, teachers were very concerned about them. It’s common in high school English classes for teachers to assign students the task of writing a journal, although these are always private. I know one English teacher in the Fairfax County VA system who actually assigned a blogging project in 2006, to the consternation of administrators (the blogs had to be “rated G”).

The piece has been discussed in a number of news broadcasts.