Bowling For Columbine Quotes

Brooks hasn’t given up. He still wants to change people. He wants to wake up the world to the problem of bullying, and he wants to reach victims and turn them off their violent fantasies. So he’s worked for the filmmaker Michael Moore on Bowling for Columbine and he’s set up an innovative website where bullied kids can communicate with each other and learn that the answer isn’t to kill. “It’s to use your mind and make things better.” Brooks, like me, does not see the shooters as people who are a world apart from everyone else. His friend Dylan Klebold, he says, was once a regular kid from a fine home with loving, involved parents. In fact, he warns, “We can just sit back and call the shooters ‘sick monsters, completely different from us.’ … Or we can accept that there are more Erics and Dylans out there, who are slowly being driven … down the same path.” Even if a victim doesn’t have a fixed mindset to begin with, prolonged bullying can instill it. Especially if others stand by and do nothing, or even join in. Victims say that when they’re taunted and demeaned and no one comes to their defense, they start to believe they deserve it. They start to judge themselves and to think that they are inferior. Bullies judge. Victims take it in. Sometimes it remains inside and can lead to depression and suicide. Sometimes it explodes into violence.

In the documentary Bowling for Columbine, heavy metal musician Marilyn Manson was asked what he would say to the kids and to the people in the community where the school shooting took place, an act some said was inspired by his music. “I wouldn’t say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say,” he said. “And that’s what no one did.