Much about this experience remains the same, generation after generation. The prom is still the prom - though today getting the date can be an elaborate ritual, as choreographed as the event itself. The trophies in the trophy case are still dusty. Drugs are everywhere. Weapons are common as cars.
Parents divorce like they're changing long-distance carriers.
On television everybody is richer than you, and having sex. Online there's always someone promoting a new and personal brand of hatred. And then came Columbine. Colo. Since then teens and teachers alike, all across the country, have walked the halls between classes and studied faces passing by, looking for a glimpse of someone they think they know, but don't. Columbine changed the way the nation looked at the experience of high school.