A Knight in Dragonland

The Daily Times has a good article on this event and a frightening follow-up, and the Journal Star managed to avoid injecting hyperbole in its initial article and the follow-up.

I have not seen any of the local TV coverage on the matter, although one Edison teacher described her class being “ambushed” by a TV crew lurking outside her school.

I’d mainly like to congratulate everyone who responded appropriately to head off this potential threat. I’d especially like to recognize the courage of the Dunlap and Metamora students who saw the threats online and did something about it. There’s a lot of pressure on kids not to “rat” on one of their own, but these teens showed a lot of fortitude and did what was right to protect the kids at Edison. Pekin Police Detective Chris Bitner expressed a similar sentiment to the Times:

It’s nice to see a teenager taking responsibility to report inappropriate material. It really does help.

It doesn’t sound as if the kid who made the threats had access to the means to carry them out, but still … calling attention to his posts may very well may have saved lives. It certainly sounds like he had a pretty intricate plan laid out.

Junior high is rough for a lot of kids. I remember being bullied as a preteen. I was a shy and chunky kid with glasses, braces and a dorky hairdo. I remember having fantasies about getting back at the kids who picked on me. Who wouldn’t in that situation? If you tell on them to teachers or your parents, you’re a rat and a sissy … and you’ll probably get pounded for it. If you cry they just come at you more. If you fight back, you get in trouble with the school. If I had an outlet to vent my frustrations like MySpace when I was growing up … who knows, I might have made some threats myself.

However, I don’t remember ever getting to the point where I started laying out intricate plans for a massacre or idolizing mass murderers like Klebold & Harris. What probably kept me from going over the edge was my loving and supportive parents and a core group of close friends. It’s sad that this kid felt so completely alone. Whether that’s actually true or not, we’ll probably never know … but we know that’s they way he felt.

Don’t rush to condemn this kid as some sort of twisted freak. He posted the stuff publicly on MySpace.  He was crying for help, whether he realized it consciously or not.  Just be glad this was discovered early … before he hurt himself or someone else.