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Rachel Dretzin Goodman: Columbine happened a month before the shooting
at Heritage. And at that point we had just left Conyers. I had several
conversations with our cameraman, people in our crew, about how striking the
similarities were between the community in which Columbine High School is and
our community in Conyers. And how the same forces that people were talking
about in Columbine had existed very clearly in Conyers. And we even made a
couple of cracks, "God it's amazing...We're lucky it didn't happen in
Conyers." It was that close. So when it did happen in Conyers, we
collectively shuddered. It was kind of amazing that after the conversations we
had-- that it actually, of all the communities in the country, it happened
there.
Barak Goodman: When I heard about it, was just minutes after it
happened. We went running over there. We were basically the first or second
crew there. There ended up being hundreds of crews, but we were right there
just after it happened. And it was this sort of iconic imagery of post--that
we all know--of post high school shooting of parents and kids hugging, all of
that stuff. But, then we spent the rest of the day going around finding our
kids. The kids that were involved and talking to them. They didn't ...there
was a kind of lack of affect that fit somehow. Yes, they were surprised, but
not that surprised. They were surprised by who it was, the kid was a very
ordinary kid. They were remarking on that fact. But the fact of the shooting
itself was just another thing. They weren't particularly shaken by it. Which
was very shaking to me. I was disturbed by that. Yet it fit with what we had
been hearing for months.
RDG: Conyers is no different than any other suburban community in
America. There's no reason it should be. It's just that we stayed there. And
that we stuck it out in a way that few news crews can afford to do. And that
allowed us to discover a whole lot of things that were never mentioned in the
coverage of the shooting. Not once--I was struck by the fact, that not once in
the coverage of the Heritage High School shooting--not once did anyone
mentioned the syphillis outbreak in Conyers. It was as though they were
completely unrelated occurrences. To us they were actually very related to one
another.
BG: Shootings are not about boys and guns. Syphillis outbreaks are not
about girls and promiscuity. They're both about kids searching for something:
attention, connection, somebody to take them in hand. There was a wonderful
sort of metaphor at the end of the school shooting in Heritage. The boy
involved, TJ Soloman, knelt down to the ground and put the gun in his mouth to
kill himself. And he was stopped in doing that by an assistant principal who
put his arm around him and held him and said, "Don't do it." And TJ dropped
the gun, and shuddered, cried, cathartically. And that to me, speaks volumes.
Somebody stepped in, took control of this kid. We have a family in our
program, at the end of our program, in which the mother does the same thing.
She finally steps in, takes control of her kid. All of these things that we're
seeing in adolescence: sexual promiscuity, violence, they all have the same
root cause. Which is that people, parents but also others, are not stepping in
and taking control of children. Giving them limits. And giving them
boundaries. And giving them a direction
RDG: I hope that the show by focusing mostly on girls but also on boys,
bridges the gulf between these two ideas. That its violence or its sex. .
It's both--and they have similar roots. Girls may express some of the same
anxieties sexually that boys express through violence. But many of those
anxieties are the same.
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