A thought to consider: the people who made the V-Tech shooter's life a living hell in high school aren't guilty of killing anybody. He was (literally) a sick man, and even in his sickness, he himself made the decisions that lead to his own fateful actions.

The people who made his life a living hell, however, are still guilty of having made someone's life a living hell.

Why do we that to each other?

That's not meant to be a scathing indictment of anybody. I'm not pretending to stand in judgement over anybody. I'm certainly not claiming to be innocent in this particular regard. If I have learned nothing from my creepy obsession with Joss Whedon, it's that everybody in high school had somebody they picked on, somebody who was in some way lower than them. Whatever sh-t got heaped upon you, you turned right around and dumped it right on somebody else.

When you're under eighteen, that's the circle of life.

Maybe you didn't realize you were doing it. Maybe you had what you consider to be a good reason. Maybe you picked on somebody, but only somebody you thought had it coming. Maybe you're just one of those people who smiled at everybody and never had what you considered to be an unkind word to say about anybody, and you never realized you were doing something that made somebody around you miserable.

After all, you treated everybody the way you wanted to be treated, and well, that's the golden rule, isn't it?

Nice having a rule of behavior that doesn't require you to look outside your owh head...

Again, that's not supposed to be an indictment of you.

Whoever you are.

Anyway, this is all a very long preamble, but I've said it often: I'm not a very concise person. "Brevity being the sole of wit," and all that.

A lot of people reading the above will probably assume I had a lousy time in high school and that I was one of the unpopular kids. Hmm. Well, was I? I don't really know. Because life is more complicated than a 44 minute TV drama, and my school was too small to really support cliques. I mean, the same guys had to be in the drama club and speech team as were on the football team... or else there wouldn't have been enough people to fill any of them. In some ways, I was liked and respected and included... and in other ways I wasn't.

What rudimentary cliques there were, I didn't play within the rules of... I was well-liked by the teachers and generally well-behaved in class (except when it came to something I genuinely disagreed with), but when I hung out with anybody, it was the biggest troublemakers and rebels.

So, high school was an awesome time for me, full of exciting experiences and opportunities... and at the same time, it wasn't. That's life. I think it's our insistence on seeing things one way or another that blinds us. When I was in high school, a classmate doing a survey for an incredibly banal class project asked me the standard "glass half full/half empty" question. I tried to tell her it's both, and was told that wasn't a valid viewpoint. Not just that it was outside the parameters of the survey, but that the viewpoint itself had no value.

"Wishy-washy" was the word that was used. The psychology teacher (who was also, go figure, the guidance counselor), used the same word when I refused to join the rest of that class in agreeing to a blanket statement condemning all recreational drug use equally. "Wishy-washy."

But that's off-topic. The subject of this post is people treating each other horribly. It's something that happens far too often in this world. What can I do about that? Not a hell of a lot, actually... but there is one thing I can do.

I can stop doing it myself.

"Be the change you want to see in the world," said Gandhi. There were people who treated me like dirt in high school. There were people who, in turn, I treated like dirt. I regret that. For all that, I didn't hate my time in high school completely... but looking back on it, I know that's where a lot of my anger comes from, and I think it's time for me to start getting past that.

I recently made a post saying I was going to stop spending so much time engaged in arguments... I didn't specify this at the time, but I meant in particular the overly personal ones. I haven't done a perfect job of following through. I've tried, though, and I think I've made some improvement... and I'm going to try harder.

I changed my forum icon from a picture of a homicidal supervillainess to a simple black and white headshot. It's a little thing, but maybe it'll help.

I have a folder (an actual literal, paper one) full of some of my English composition homework from my junior and senior years. The quality of some of it is, of course, slightly embarrassing... but what strikes me more reading it is that I was such an optimistic and tolerant person back then. My senior year in particular I would peg as being the worst year of my life, for a variety of reasons... but there's one particular paper I wrote, where the assignment was to enumerate our beliefs... and when I look at it, I think, "My goth... how have I fallen so far?"

Teenaged me wouldn't be ashamed to be seen standing next to adult me, but she would be disappointed.

I write this after a week or so of emotional turmoil, soul-searching, ruminating, and more missed sleep than usual... so if it seems a little extra-tasty-rambly, that's probably why. I know there's parts I'm leaving out, and I know there's parts of this I could cut out and I wuold lose nothing, but I'm going to leave it as it is and just post this unedited.

Anyway, that's all... except for a general observation. If we did nothing else but treated each other decently, the world would be a better place. I don't mean love everybody, give everyone you meet the money out of your wallet and the shirt off your back... just be decent.

Not even excellent.

Just decent.

That's doesn't seem like it's asking so much.