Yes, the Ever-lasting contrast. Since existence has known, the 'fight' between good & evil has continued. Obviously, this fight can never end. Good things turn bad, bad things become good. My fav. contrasting symbol, because it is so true & means so much – the battle between good & bad never ends… Here we ponder on the tragedy of Dylan Klebold.
Dyl calls it as he sees it. Touche! 😉 Oh no, dude, don’t say you’re sorry.. We’re not.
Although his parents harbor some anger at the Klebolds and Harrises, Brooks Brown himself seems not to. In fact, six months after the killings, he says, Brown drove up to the Klebold home, in the wooded foothills outside Littleton. Dylan’s parents were there. Sue Klebold served Brown some strawberry shortcake. “I was chilling with Tom and Sue, and we talked about all the different lies the sheriff was telling, and Tom said, ‘You know who would be great to get out here? Michael Moore. Go on his Web site — it has his e-mail. I can’t do this because our lawyer won’t let us. But that would be awesome.’ I sent Michael Moore an e-mail and said, ‘I’m this kid from Columbine, you might have seen me on the news. I’d really like to talk to you for a couple of minutes and see if you’d want to come out and do a movie on Columbine.’ So Tom Klebold’s the reason ‘Bowling for Columbine’ happened.”
A little background on The Rising Sign or Ascendant: It is ‘the mask’ of the persona, and the first impression we make on those we meet. It could be said that the qualities of the sign that was rising on the eastern horizon imprints on the outer self as we emerge into the world. After that, each time we encounter a new situation or person, this is the “face” we reveal. If you’ve ever been puzzled by how others describe you, it could be that they’ve encountered your Rising sign qualities. It’s the image facing outward, and might not be how you see yourself at all. It is the front door of the self, but as much a part of the personality as the Sun sign.
By comparison, your Sun Sign describes your basic nature and the core personality traits that remain constant through the ups and downs of life. It is the image you shine out to the world, but it comes from that truest, innermost part of you. The Sun Sign describes your unique personal center.
However, even though Dylan’s Sun Sign is Virgo, he presents more like a Libra in vibe. Why? This is because in addition to his Libra Ascendant, he also has five other planets in Libra as well. (This will be in another post I’m working on.) Heavily influenced by Libra as well as his moon (emotions/feelings) in Aquarius. One could say his astrological natal chart is dominated by Air. It’s no wonder he could not turn off the mental energy and was often thinking a ‘shit loads of El Thoughtz’ 24/7.
If you read the description below, you’ll see how much Dylan’s Libra Rising corroborates Sue Klebold’s own descriptions of her son Pt 1_Pt 2_ Pt 3_Pt 4 as being a good listener and also being flexible, easily persuaded to change his mind to another person’s point of view. Acceptance and approval met everything to Dylan; loyalty to friends meant he came across as essentially easy-going or ‘chill’, soft spoken, respectful, not the sort to make waves, or burn bridges with established friendships. At one point, he was in the midst of a moral dilemma concerned the safety of his childhood friend, Brooks Brown, concerning the death threats on Eric’s website. He made the risky decision to secretly tip off Brooks with the website link on a piece of paper and specified that Brooks should not divulge where he got the information. As the Libran ‘middle man’ caught between the feud of his two good friends, Dylan was able to circumvent potential disharmony with Eric yet also warn Brooks to keep him safe. Brooks also mentioned in ‘No Easy Answers’ that Dylan seemed relieved when Brooks and Eric finally made up and there was peace again between them.
Libra Ascendant/Rising Sign Traits:
“You are a natural diplomat, reasonable, tolerant, fair, always willing to listen to varying viewpoints, and ready to see the other side of an issue. Even if you strongly disagree with someone, you will try to find points of similarity and agreement rather than emphasizing the differences. You often avoid taking an extreme or one-sided stance on anything. You have a strong desire for harmonious and pleasant relationships, and express a spirit of cooperation, compromise, friendship, and fairness. You very much want to be liked and because of your need for approval and acceptance, you are easily influenced by others’ opinions, especially when young. You so much want to please that often you will suppress your own intense or unpleasant feelings in order not to offend others. Sometimes your politeness is interpreted as phoniness or wishy-washiness.
Your need to create harmony extends to your physical environment and personal appearance as well. You appreciate beauty and have a natural sense of balance, symmetry, and proportion. You do everything in good taste, with a sense of style and art. From your home furnishings to your choice of clothing, everything must be aesthetically appealing, not simply functional or utilitarian.
You also feel that relationships are an art, one that especially interests you and one that you are usually quite skilled at, for you possess tact and acute awareness of other people. Marriage is very significant to you and finding the right person to share your life with is extremely important. Being part of a close couple seems natural to you – you are not an independent loner. Having a partner increases your self-confidence. You do have a tendency, however, to become overly dependent on your partner and perhaps not to develop a clearly defined identity outside of the relationship. Finding the balance between being yourself and blending and uniting with another is a challenge for you.
Others see you as an agreeable, smooth, harmonious, and "nice” person. Though there may be much more to you, this is the sort of face you show to the world. You possess personal charm and an understated, noncombative manner. Your motto could be “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” for you usually take a friendly, cooperative approach rather than a strong, forceful, I’m-going-to-conquer-the-world attitude.“
You could call Dylan a thespian. Beginning with a production of Bye Bye Birdie his freshman year, Dylan ran sound on a number of school shows, including Oklahoma! and Frankenstein this year. Sometimes he worked alongside one of his close friends. “Dylan and [the friend (likely Zach Heckler)] would drink during plays,” says Sarah Slater “They would bring in Aftershock [a potent cinnamon-flavored spirit] while Dylan did sound. They wouldn’t do it every time, and they wouldn’t get drunk. They would go somewhere else and get drunk.”
Cliques at Columbine High coexist about as well as cliques do in any American high school: icily. Circulating around the noisy jock center are the preps in their Abercrombie & Finch, cheerleaders giggling near the water fountains, computer geeks, skaters, thespians and debate-teamers. Gangsta…
it’s interesting what brooks brown said about dylan, how it really wasn’t adorable how insecure/awkward he was— it was painful
and i think a lot of people forget this sometimes? people want to make dylan out to be this cute lovable guy but he really, truly hated himself and i know how that looks,…
Some good points. Though, I don’t think there’s any delusions that Dylan was only a smidge shy on the surface and warmly adorable just underneath. Not by a long shot: it was crippling social inhibition and internal, chronic feelings of being completely ‘unsalvageable.’ There’s plenty of people that can relate. But I think what resonates and makes people smile half wistfully amused actually IS the awkwardly painful shyness and his groping attempts to compensate, for example, to act the part of a cool, smooth character in which he then becomes self conscious and screws up his lines. It’s that trying really, really hard and failing because, inside, he knows he’s not that by a long shot. His foibles are endearing; it’s not that he is a charismatically cute, ‘smooth’ shy guy. Brooks just missed it entirely.
“We were outside, playing in the leftover snow from a few days before. As we ran around, I found a big patch of ice that was starting to melt but was still plenty solid enough to play with.
"Hey, Dylan!”I said.“Come here!”By the time Dylan arrived, I was already bouncing and sliding on the slushy patch. Dylan gamely joined in, our feet smashing little spiderwebs into the ice as it buckled under our weight.
Dylan’s foot crashed down on a corner of the ice and made the whole patch shift. It tipped into a puddle underneath, which splashed a good amount of muddy water into the air. A girl in our class was standing nearby, wearing a brand-new coat her parents had just given her, the mud left a jagged brown stripe right down the front of it.
It was an accident. We hadn’t thought the ice was going to do that. But our classmate took one look at her ruined coat and started screaming.
The second grade teacher immediately ran over to assess what was happening.
[…] We tried to get the teacher to listen to us, but she ordered us to be quiet as she carried the girl’s coat into the bathroom.
Both of us were bawling by the time she had us at the sink, wetting a toothbrush. She put the coat in Dylan’s hands.“I want this cleaned!”she ordered.“You two will stay in here and scrub that mud off, and you’re not leaving until I say you’re finishes!” Choking back our tears, we took up the brush and started working. We quickly discovered that using a toothbrush on mud wasn’t very efficient – but we didn’t have any choice. Both of us continued to cry, our ears burning red from the embarrassment of being yelled at, of our teacher’s spiteful glare, of people looking at us as we worked.
“It’s not coming out!”Dylan kept saying, rubbing the same spot for what seemed like the 500th time.
“We have to get it,”I remember saying in response. I just kept repeating that.“We have to get it.” – No Easy Answers
Dah Hands in Dah Hair.
p.s. His hand size beats out Brooks Brown who is taller than Dylan. Also.. I have this theory that Dylan grew his hair to lose the natural curl and if he rubbed his hands through it enough times in a day, it would look completely straight which is the look he was going for.
There are these days on which I start to wonder about some of the more trivial stuff.. such as Dylan handing that scrap of paper with Eric’s website written on it to Brooks.
Was it simply, as many seem to believe, Dylan growing a pair and deciding to let his old friend know what a new friend was…
“I knew Dylan long enough to know that he didn’t start out as a monster. He became one. That’s what makes his fate so scary.”
-Brooks Brown
The first play of our senior year was Frankenstein, and I won the role of Frankenstein’s monster. The play Frankenstein isn’t anything like the old Boris Karloff movie, with the giant mumbling monster who lurches around with corks coming out of his neck. The stage version of Frankenstein is much more loyal to the book’s theme of society fearing what it doesn’t understand.
Frankenstein’s monster is a deep, troubled creature who was created by a scientist, then dismissed as an abomination. From there, he wanders alone, labeled as a “freak” by the rest of society and rejected by everyone who sees him. The cruelty eventually leads the monster to seek revenge. – No Easy Answers, Brooks Brown
The seniors in our theatre troupe decided to produce a special video for Frankenstein. Not only was it a farewell project for the drama students, it was a farewell to Mrs. Caruthers, who had been one of our favorite teachers over the past four years.
For the first part of the tape, we did interviews with the cast and crew about their favorite memories of Mrs. Caruthers. We then added in footage from rehearsal, along with scenes from the movie Young Frankenstein.
Dylan,Zach Heckler and I were the three people who did “commentary” for the tape. The three of us sat down in the front row of the Columbine auditorium and set the camera down on the stage. Our job was to review all of the people in the Frankenstein program and offer both compliments and “inside jokes” that only those involved in the department would understand. Later we would inter-cut the footage with scenes from Young Frankenstein and show the finished version to other people in the drama club.
It was a lot of fun to make, and the camera caught a few moments of Dylan coming out of his quiet shell. We went backwards through the program, reading each name and offering a few observations. The first name Zach read off was Principal DeAngelis.
Dylan leaned in toward the camera.“Ha ha ha,” he said.
The three of us roasted each other as much as we could. Dylan, who had sat quietly through some of the early jokes, happily came out of his shell for ribbing on me.
Dylan gave special mention to the makeup crew. “Damn good job,“ he said. “Brooks, you were ugly as shit. And that’s hard to beat, with the way you look normally.”
“I was uglier than I even am usually.” I agreed.
“Don’t get fire within twenty feet of the pants,” Dylan warned, referring to my ‘Frankenstein monster” costume. “There were about thirty different chemicals put into that.” (This was true, actually. Dylan and I made the pants using an old pair of jeans that we soaked in gasoline and paint thinner to make them look as horrible as possible. After the final performance, we took them out to a field and flicked a cigarette at them. They immediately burst into flames.)
“Zach, how did this guy do on sound?” I asked, referring to Dylan.
“Oh, he sucked,” Zach replied.
Dylan threw his hands up. “Thank you!”
“And everybody was crying about it, because it was late,” Zach added. Dylan hadn’t finished preparing the sound cues by Mrs. C’s original deadline.
“Yeah, yeah,”Dylan said. “I’d like to bring forth attention to this, actually – for three years now, I’ve been doing this job. Just a guess here, but I think I know what I’m doing—“
“Okay, shut up,” I said. We all laughed.
That was how the video went. We picked out names, made a few good-natured jokes, then complimented the person and moved on. We had especially kind words for Mrs. Caruthers, whom all three of us were going to miss.
“You’re losing your entire sound and light crew,” I said to the camera. “This will be the last play we get to do with you.”
The three of us asked for bribes in exchange for passing along our knowledge to the next crop of students. “Hey, Mrs. C, next Saturday – big ol’ party,” Dylan said. “Heineken, Miller… We need you.” It was a running joke for theatre students to try and get Mrs. Caruthers to buy booze for us, because we knew she never would.
We offered our thanks to Mrs. Caruthers for her inspiration. “From the people who have been working with you the longest, we want to say, very beautiful job with all the plays,” I said.
“Very well done,” Dylan added. “All of these kids over the years – I don’t know how, but … you put the whole thing together.”
“You’ve taught us how to work on our own,” I said. “We really did this play on our own, and it was fantastic. And we owe it to you, Mrs. C.”
After the final performance that night, everyone from the show watched the video. My mom took pictures. There was Dylan, laughing and having a good time. Just like everyone else.
–Brooks Brown, No Easy Answers, Chapter 9, Suburban Life
“Imagine your own best friend. Someone you’ve known for almost your whole life. Someone who used to laugh and tell you jokes, and showed you his new Wolf badge from Club Scouts, and chased frogs with you around the creek behind your grade school on Friday afternoons. Someone who, just yesterday, you skipped school with. Someone you always thought you knew.
Now imagine that, in front of nowhere, that friend turns around and guns down over a dozen people.”
“This production is the real truth of Columbine,” Brown said the morning after the show. “We have never stopped wanting the complete truth of what happened. There is something to be learned. Eric and Dylan were not crazy. Crazy is easy. They did the things they did because they had the motivations to do them.”
The Everlasting Contrast 