Published February 2, 2018
The mass shooting Wednesday in Parkland, Florida, and the public reactions from students who survived it caused me to think a lot about high school. During my four years, nothing remotely close to it ever happened. Until Columbine in April 1999, something like that occurring on a high school campus was largely unimaginable to me.
Things are different now. On and off campus, mass shootings happen so often in the United States, we hardly have enough time to process one before the next. Murder on a large scale seems so commonplace, there is a part of us and our institutions that’s increasingly numb to it. But televised comments by students David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, as well as social media posts by other students, signal a refusal to accept the status quo. That’s good.
A day or two after the shooting, I saw comments of support for surviving students and could hear echos from years ago. My mind drifted back to “The Breakfast Club” (1985) and to dynamics that are constant from generation to generation. Soon after the movie’s release, an English professor told me that it reminded him of “Blackboard Jungle“ (1955), and how he saw it one way in his youth, and another way as an adult (and as a teacher). That dynamic was itself a bit of an extension of a subtext in “The Breakfast Club.”
Assistant principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) tells Carl the janitor (John Kapelos), “Carl, I’ve been teaching for 22 years, and each year, these kids get more and more arrogant.” Carl, a former Man of the Year at that very school (Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois 60062) is having none of it.
“Aww, bullshit, man,” he says. “Come on, Vern. The kids haven’t changed, you have.”
After Vernon says the kids have turned on him, Carl has more to say: “Listen, Vern, if you were 16, what would you think of you, huh?”
But the quote that kept coming back to me amid the comments by and about the student survivors of the school shooting wasn’t even written for the movie, yet it appears prominently after the opening credits and before any dialogue in the movie set on Saturday morning, March 24, 1984. It was lyrics from David Bowie’s “Changes,” released more than a decade earlier, in December 1971, more or less midway between “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Breakfast Club.”
Consider it a song quote and movie quote all rolled into one.
As others have pointed out more eloquently than I could, these students speaking out after the shooting at their school (Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida 33076) have touched a chord as they’ve cut through the bullshit and excuses of adults, politicians included. They are demanding action, and they are organizing walkout days on March 14 and on April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine massacre.
There’s a delicate balance between letting high school students run the world — which Richard Vernon of “The Breakfast Club” fearfully knows they will one day do — and taking them seriously as human beings who will inherit that world from us the way we’ll leave it for them. Two thoughts come to mind today about the students in Parkland: Yes, they’re quite aware of what they’re going through, and when it comes to doing something about mass killings at schools, one could be forgiven for thinking that they could hardly do worse than the adults have to date.