22 quotes
Once you start seeing injustice in one place, it's like taking off blinders- you start to see injustice everywhere, and how it is all connected.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
You have to have never been bullied to think that it teaches something valuable and necessary and makes you a stronger person.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Cruel and callous when on top, afraid and smiling all the way to the grave when not- that pretty much sums up the post-Reagan zeitgeist.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Anything, no matter how bizarre, was cited as the cause for slave rebellions except for the most obvious source: slavery.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Another journalist, Joanne Jacobs, summed it up even more simply: "Evil, not rage" inspired the Columbine killers, she wrote. Well, that settles that!
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
If a rebellion is small and just starting, it looks crazy; but if it begins to succeed, lasts, and builds up momentum, it inevitably legitimizes itself.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
It is hard to imagine that the kid became a better person after this. More scared, more cautious, and more alienated from his peers, sure. Which perhaps is all we want.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
I don't know a single useful lesson that I or anyone else ever learned from getting bullied- it only brought shame and debilitating memories. Getting bullied always leads you to wrong decisions and wrong conclusions. You compensate in all the wrong ways.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Bullying, in our cultural propaganda, is simply a dramatic plot device which the hero overcomes. Rarely, if ever, is it represented as it really works- as something privately eating away at kids, flat and uninteresting, and never overcome.
As the Economic Policy Institute reported, "What income growth there was over the 1979-1989 period was driven primarily by more work at lower wages".
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Even Hitler is given a context by serious historians- the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of Weimar Germany- whereas rampage murderers, like slaves once before them, are portrayed as having killed without reason.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
The whole country is infested with this meanness and coldness, and no one is allowed to admit it. Only the crazy ones sense that it is wrong- that what is "normal" is not at all normal- and some of them, adults and kids alike, fight back with everything they have.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Under Reagan, corporations transformed from provider's of stability for employees and their families to fear-juiced stress engines. Reagan's legacy to America and modern man is not victory in the Cold War, where he simply got lucky; it is instead one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world, all under the propaganda diversion of "making America competitive" and "unleashing the creative energies of the American worker".
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre- they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
You're a weirdo if you complain. It's your own fault if you're traumatized by a massacre. It's your own fault if you're poor. It's your own fault if you get downsized, overworked, bullied, and fail. Get over it.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Zero tolerance policies, heavy police responses to what would have once been considered empty boy boasting, and the increased fear and suspicion that they inspire only fuel more rage. The toxic school culture is only reinforced by repressive measures.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
At Columbine, parents and students both felt that bullies were favored by teachers and administrators, and that complainers were often ignored or blamed. Indeed, losers pay for being losers twice over in our schools, taking both the punishment and the blame.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Fear, imposed from the top down- from shareholder to senior executive, senior executive to executive, and so on down the chain right to the maximally squeezed Manpower temp- is the dominant trope in the post-Reagan corporate culture. One of the simplest ways to instill this fear is to make employees acutely aware that their jobs are never safe.
It's widely accepted today that high schools are miserable, nerve-pinching stress machines. They are governed by dim hypocrites; the climate favors the cruelest and shallowest students, and many, if not most students, are constantly suppressing a burning sense of injustice, shame, and powerlessness.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)