“Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.”

mrfrodo:

ten years ago, any time you heard about Marilyn Manson on the news, he was either being blamed for some awful homicide/suicide, or being accused of corrupting the minds of the youth.
it was mostly because people parents didn’t understand why this man was dressed head to (high heeled) foot in PVC…

I felt the full wrath of this. When I was 15, I dressed in a lot of black. I wore combat boots that went up to my knees with fishnets and mini-skirts. I was dating a guy that wore the same type of clothing. (Really, it was a match made in heaven since we were the only two in the school to look like this and we did it independently.) I was a great student, always getting A’s and I never had a single day of detention. Sure, my English teacher told me that him and the rest of my teachers had a meeting on the shortness of my skirts but I didn’t worry about it because they weren’t any shorter than what every other girl was wearing. I just happen to have black and red hair to go with mine. I had vinyl pants that ended up being banned because they caused a ‘distraction’ in class even though the teacher that made this allegation didn’t have me as a student. (I think he was just uncomfortable with checking out my ass as I walked down the hallway. It’s the only thing that makes sense…)

It was all in good fun. I had a shitty home life and I turned to music to make it better. It just so happened that I liked dark music and everything that went along with it and instead of idolizing mindless pop icons I was idolizing people who actually had something to say. 

I was still a naive kid though. I honestly thought that no matter what I dressed like, I’d be judged on the merit of my actions and intellect. That was until there was a bomb threat at my high school.

I had already been singled out in class for my ‘views’ on the Columbine shooting. Really, I think they just wanted me to explain why it happened. I couldn’t though. I wasn’t picked on. My transformation to the “dark side” actually helped my popularity. I think the students around me actually respected such a blatant display of rebellion. (My class had a very high intelligence ratio with more than 50% graduating with a A- or better average.)

Back to the bomb threat: The day it was called in, I was actually on a field trip to a play, being that I was in the theater club (not to be confused with Drama Club). When we came back we noticed the entire school was standing on the track, so we followed suit and straggled over there. The school  was cleared and we got to go back in and I didn’t hear anything about it for 2 days. Then, after those 2 days, I walked into my house to see my mother there, which was odd since she worked past 4 and I always came home to an empty house. She had just gotten off the phone with the police. They wanted me to come in for questioning.

Being that my mother never liked me much, she didn’t stand up for me. She didn’t tell them no, so we went. They asked me a bunch of inconsequential questions and I figured it was over. Why wouldn’t I? I had nothing to hide. This is also about the time my mom started sleeping with a board wedged between her door and her dresser so I couldn’t open it while she was sleeping. Not that I ever did or had a reason to. I tried to avoid her at all costs.

We came back home and I fully expected her to ask me if I’d done it or at least question why they’d think I’d done something like this. She didn’t though.

I went out like normal, to escape that house and came back home with just enough time to go to bed and get 6 hours of sleep before school the next morning. I told my friends about the day before and they conveyed the cop’s identical attempts with them, except their mothers wouldn’t allow it. I got the feeling that my mother didn’t mind the idea of selling me down the river but that’s neither here nor there. I thought it was done so I just left it alone. I went on with my day.

I got out of school and took the bus home, like usual. I figured my mom wouldn’t be home, but she was, again. I walked in quietly, because living with her was like walking on egg shells and I never knew what was going to happen when I opened that door. This time, nothing happened. There wasn’t anyone downstairs.

This was odd. My mother never left the house unless it was for work. Never. She didn’t take trips to the store, she didn’t go for walks. If she did have to go to the store, she did on her commute to work.

Then I heard voices upstairs so I went to investigate.

It was the police and they were searching my room.

I knew I didn’t have anything to hide but there’s nothing more stomach turning than someone going through your stuff when you’re a teenager. Especially a cop. When I walked in they acted like I wasn’t there, until they found a stack of poetry I’d written. They made me sit on the bed and they read every single one aloud to me. Just the idea of someone reading them made me sick, but to be reading them out loud, in front of my mother, was beyond comprehension. The poems talked about my adolescent hate for my mother, my depression she refused to acknowledge. Then they found the notes I kept from my boyfriend and a few from my friends. One of them was an answer to a question I had about weed, which I had yet to try at the time. I think at that point I hadn’t even been drunk yet. (Of course drinking sounded like a fine idea after this.)

They asked me what the poetry meant. They embarrassed me by laughing at it, by asking my mom if she knew what they meant with a smirk on their face. She didn’t because she never cared what was going on in my life. 

Eventually they left and I later found out my principal had given them a list of six names to investigate. I didn’t even know he knew my name. I’d never spoken a single word to him. That list of six names included me and my boyfriend and our four closest friends. None of us were dumb enough to do something like that or even entertain the notion. We were smarter than a bomb threat. 

It ended up being someone that had graduated from the school a few years prior, someone that we didn’t even know.

I never got an apology. None of my friends did either, but they never had their rooms searched. They were never questioned.

Columbine screwed me up pretty bad. Not because it was a terrible thing that happened and people looked at me for answers but because everyone thought I was capable of doing the same thing, including my own mom.

Sometimes my dad looks at me like I’m still a child and tells me I don’t know how the world works (because I’m not a racist). He thinks that I’ll eventually “see” people for who they are, which means treating them differently because of they way they look.

What he doesn’t understand is that I saw how the world works a long time ago and I refuse to contribute to something like that. I hate those kids that shot up their school. Not because it was a terrible thing, though that helps, but because their actions managed to reach across the country and fuck up my life for a moment in time. They created a stereotype within a couple of hours. One that I spend the rest of my high school career trying to dig my way out of.