Columbine and Elian Gonzalez
Today we take an obligatory jaunt down to serious town and remember two major events from 1999. One set the stage for a looping cycle of horrors that we still find ourselves stuck with and another involves the fate a little boy who had no control over his future and was the subject of a political round of tug-of-war.
Columbine
You can’t look back on 1999 without thinking of Columbine, the school shooting we tend to point to as the one that started the horrifying trend of mass murder we’re still forced to tolerate. It wasn’t the first school shooting and it wasn’t the worst in terms of total loss of life, even at the time, but it was the most televised. This was a world post O.J. Simpson Bronco chase and we were not only used to having endless news coverage forced upon us by way of misinformation, speculation, and conspiracy, but we demanded it. Some things never change.
The horrors of Columbine remain relevant today so there’s no need for a full recap. But parts of the Columbine story remind me of the case of Richard Jewell, the man who was wrongfully suspected of being the Olympic Park bomber in 1996. People left 1996 associating that bombing with that man even though years later he was determined innocent. Similarly, people left 1999 thinking the culprits behind Columbine acted out because they were victims themselves and were bullied by “jocks”. That was the narrative theme early in the coverage, well, that and trench coats.
If you’ve worked up the courage in the years since to look back on Columbine through any number of lenses, like documentaries, podcasts, or survivor accounts, you’ll find out quickly that most of what we were told about the motive at the time wasn’t true. They weren’t seeking revenge for being bullied. They were the bullies and exhibited plenty of red flags in the days when no one really understood what those flags could lead to. They were not and are not deserving of any empathy. And the trench coat thing? Well, that wasn’t as big a deal as the media made it out to be, yet the biggest sweeping action to stop school shootings across America in the years following Columbine was to ban trench coats. Great. I guess cosplaying as a 1940’s detective is the real problem.
Columbine is an event that most folks who lived through it can remember vividly, especially if you were a high school student at the time. It was a Wednesday in April, and there is something about the month of April, and Wednesdays in particular, that I associate with catastrophes. The LA riots kicked off Wednesday, April 29, 1992, the Oklahoma City bombing was Wednesday, April 19, 1995, and the Columbine shootings were Wednesday, April 20, 1999. Getting off the school bus and walking in the house to see what my mom was watching on TV came with extra stress on April Wednesdays in the 90’s. April in general is a month full of awful anniversaries: the Virginia Tech shooting, the Chernobyl incident, the raid on the Branch Davidians, the Bay of Pigs, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Hitler’s birthday, and plenty more. Get it together April.
April is also the month most commonly associated with stealing babies from chickens, decorating their eggs all silly-like, hiding them all over the place for our children to find, and then eating them while we blame rabbits for the whole thing.
Elian Gonzalez
Fast-forward to Thanksgiving Day. This story straddles 1999 and 2000, but gets it start on a beach north of Miami where five-year-old Elian Gonzalez and two of his family members are seen floating in the sea on innertubes by two fishermen. Gonzalez and 12 of his family members had left Cuba on a boat en route to the US for a better life, but their boat broke down just as a massive storm came through and displaced them into the ocean. Elian’s mother tossed him in an innertube and hoped for the best before she drowned. Elian was fortunately rescued but his story was just beginning.
The two fisherman reluctantly handed Elian over to the US Coast Guard, as they were empathetic to his situation and worried he would be sent back to Cuba due to the “wet feet, dry feet policy” which is an interpretation of the Cuban Adjustment Act that anyone who reaches land could pursue residency in the US a year later, otherwise they would be returned to their home country. Elian was given to his uncle who lived in Miami while the two countries attempted to sort the matter.
Elian’s father, Julian Miguel, met with Fidel Castro and said his son was taken out of Cuba without his knowledge. Fidel called for the boy’s return. By this time, Elian was a symbol for refugees and the Cuban exile community at-large. Due to this, his case garnered lots and lots of attention. In the end, a judge revoked the uncle’s temporary custody and Attorney General Janet Reno made the decision to send the boy back to his father in Cuba. The decision dispirited those hoping Elian could remain in the US, but giving the boy back to his father does follow some order of reasoning. The real issue was the method by which Elian was extracted from his uncle’s home.
Prior to his removal, it was claimed that Elian’s uncle and family had threatened violence if agents came to take the boy. In response to this, 130 Immigration and Naturalization Service agents descended on the house where Elian slept in the pre-dawn hours of April 22, 2000 with full force. There is a widely published photograph of Elian being held by a relative while an agent dressed to kill aims a machine gun in his direction. Elian looked understandably terrified and the whole operation looked completely senseless.
As of 2023, Elian still lives in Cuba and was recently nominated to the island’s National Assembly. In 2013, Gonzalez said he wasn’t religious but that if he did profess to have a religion, “..my God would be Fidel Castro. He is like a ship that knew to take this crew on the right path.” He continues to support the government that brought him home.
Again, I was 14 at the time and had very little understanding of what was going on with regard to Elian. I didn’t pay attention to his story then like I would today. The image of him being seized left grill marks on my brain. Looking back on the story and seeing that image made it all feel like yesterday even though Elian turns 30 years old this year.
