So I’ve been holding off on talking about this for a while. For those of you who don’t read my articles, William Poole, a Kentucky high school student was arrested and detained after writing stories that were deemed to contain “a direct threat to Clark High School”. The kid, in response, claimed that his stories were fiction and that the stories were about zombies. Jeff Vandermeer and Neil Gaiman have both commented about this story on their sites, as have numerous others on the Web. So I figured I’d shut my mouth and let other, more eloquent people say the things I would have been saying anyway.
Today, I read this article in which, shock and awe!, it is revealed that the boy’s writings didn’t actually contain zombies, at all:
What they do contain, Winchester police Detective Steven Caudill testified yesterday, is evidence that he had tried to solicit seven fellow students to join him in a military organization called No Limited Soldiers.
The writings describe a bloody shootout in "Zone 2," the designation given to Clark County.
"All the soldiers of Zone 2 started shooting," Caudill read on the witness stand. "They're dropping every one of them. After five minutes, all the people are lying on the ground dead."
The tone of the remainder of the article is one of vindication; it suggests that the police in this matter are the poor victims of ignorant Web junkies who were quick to bombard them with epithets like "idiots" and "incestuous hillbillies,” when in fact, they had a real and present threat that needed immediate attention. It concludes with this, from detective Steven Caudill:
But after school shootings such as the one at Columbine High School in Colorado, where 13 people died, authorities must take threats seriously, he said in an interview.
"Do we as a society want the police to stop there—that he didn't mean it?" he (Caudill) asked. "I'm not going to take that responsibility and have children's and police officers' blood on my hands."
That’s great, but he’s missing one major point: that Poole didn’t actually threaten anyone. What he did was write disturbing fiction about destroying his school. Ignore for a second, if it’s possible, that every high school student has fantasies about destroying their school, ridding the world of a classmate or a clique, tying up and abusing their principle, or what have you and assume that Poole’s writings were genuinely the product of a disturbed and murderous mind; writing down a story about killing classmates is in no way the same as threatening a classmate with death.
Had Poole said to someone, “I am going to kill/main/blow up/torture you/your school,” that would constitute a threat. But he didn’t. He wrote his fantasies out in a short story, which is a patently sane and legal way of dealing with feelings of violence.
See, the police aren’t saying that they’ve found evidence that he was beginning to stockpile weapons, or that they’ve found evidence of a conspiracy in action, or that they’ve found evidence that he was beginning to act on his stories. And until they do, they have no business in the matter. None, at all. Until the kid makes a move to actually enact his fantasies, all the police should be doing is sitting on their incestuous hillbilly asses and suggesting the name of a good psychiatrist (for example on why this is the case, see Minority Report…or read a good book on causality).
It’s an unfortunate thing that crimes happen, that lives take tragic turns, that blood is shed. It’s an unfortunate thing that the world is cold and that death sometimes comes for our children at the hands of our children. But more unfortunate is the society in which a child’s grandparents call the police when they discover a few short stories that he’s written. More unfortunate is the society that thinks that they can stop these awful things by declaring criminal everyone who suggests openly that they might have a dark side. It's in these societies that mental illness festers and grows, that people who truly are sick don't seek help for fear that they will be declared enemies of society.
More than that, if we keep looking to lock up everyone who shows a sign that they might pose a threat at some time, we will never grow into adulthood as a society. Tragic deaths are awful, yes, and they hurt us in the short term, but if we are smart they do not kill us. What they do is make us stronger and more able to face the big bad world sanely and with power. We want to protect ourselves from real harm, yes, but if we turn to the police like mommy and daddy to take away the bad man every time someone suggests something bad might maybe could happen, we’ll raise a society of children, all of us too afraid to face what the big world will throw at us without holding our government’s iron hand. And it is when that happens that we will be in the truest of danger.
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The thing is, when Americans do try to be proactive, we do it in these asinine ways, such as arresting people who haven't committed a crime yet because we think they might commit one soon. Or attacking other countries because their people are a shade of brown like the people who attacked us. We're like the little kid who punches another little kid because we think he was going to punch us first.
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