What Columbine by Dave Cullen taught me about writing
Writing is one of the ways we try to combat the worst shit humans do to each other.
We try to think shit through by viewing it from multiple perspectives, ruminating on it and drawing connections that maybe we hadn't seen before.
The Gulag Archipelago, Diary of a Young Girl, Man’s Search for Meaning – these books actually do something. You're a different person when you end those books compared to when you started.
How are you different? Stronger, from rebuilding the broken places. Together, writers and readers journey into the dark, underground realm where we don’t know what's going on, all our presuppositions are wrong and we can't even trust our senses.
Columbine immediately confronted a bunch of stuff I thought I knew about the high school massacre. Dave Cullen does fine work skewering the myths pedalled by the media/public over the years.
Part of what writing can do is show you shit you don’t know. Or show you that shit you know is actually wrong.
Before I read Columbine, I lived a life which contained a few errors. I assumed what I'd heard was correct. Then I read his words and realised I'd been wrong the whole time.
How many other wrong-thinks/falsehoods/lies are inhabiting my consciousness right now? Lies I know about are one thing. It's the lies I don't even know I'm telling myself – they're the ones to watch out for. They're the ones that inhabit your bed, fuckin with your dreams, beliefs and presuppositions.
What kind of person are you going to be depends on the lies and truths you live by. If you want to have fewer lies and more truths inhabiting the one-and-a-half-litre capacity of your skull, then we gotta read and write the hardest books we can find about the gnarliest shit humans do to each other.
Here are some to get you started:
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account – Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s account of being forced to perform scientific experiments as Josef Mengele’s lab assistant.
Man is Wolf to Man – Janusz Bardach’s memoir about barely surviving Siberian labour camps.
Shake Hands with the Devil and A Time for Machetes – two books on the Rwandan Genocide – one from the perspective of the leader of the UN Peacekeeping mission that stood by and watched it go down, the other a collection of interviews with perpetrators of the genocide.
Hiroshima – John Hersey’s little book lays out in perfect detail what it’s like walking around a city right after a nuclear explosion.
Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust – A collection of interviews and first-hand accounts by regular people about what it was like in the WWII death camps.
These books will seriously fuck you up. Crying, staring into the distance, feeling physically sick, these are all appropriate responses when you read books like this.
Run towards these feelings. They're burning deadwood – allowing your humanity to refresh, rejuvenate and rejoice in the fact you're alive and you share this beautiful planet with 8 billion brothers and sisters.
Read hard. Read wide. Read free.