I graduated from high school in Colorado in 1999—the final year of the millennium and nearly 2,000 years after the birth of Christ. In April of that same year, just an hour down the road, two students by the names of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold precipitated the era of nihilistic, obliterative massacres in America, murdering 12 classmates and one teacher at their high school in Littleton, Colo., before killing themselves.
This was before “mass shootings” had been put on a seemingly endless loop. The entire country had not yet learned the unspoken, dark habit of being unsurprised. Those of us who were set to graduate that year discovered that some of our generation believed it was better to destroy than to create, better to nullify than to affirm. Rather than a journey toward graduation together, these two boy-men had chosen death. Nulla cum laude.
Fyodor Dostoevsky had prophetically warned in Demons—I wonder if it was on the shelf in the library that day at that school—that the deadliest poison in human life is not anger but boredom. A boredom that contains the most thorough rejection of existence. A mocking, lazy, listless, proud, ugly and spiteful boredom that looks at the whole of being, its shimmering grandeur, its never-spent newness, and says a single word: no.
The high school where the massacre happened was named for Colorado’s official wildflower, the columbine. In the Rocky Mountains, columbines grow in alpine meadows and tundra. Their fragile blooms gather in clusters, ghostlike amid the jagged rocks, the remote peaks and dark ravines, a luminous and strange apparition of the gift of being.
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Jason Blakely is an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University. He is the author of We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power and, most recently, of Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life. This essay is adapted from the 2024 Annual Newman Lecture at the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage on Feb. 27, 2024.
With thanks to America and Jason Blakely, where this article originally appeared.
