Columnist Susan Snyder: Pain still just under the radar

Friday, March 9, 2001 | 3:58 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column also appears Tuesdays and Fridays in the Las Vegas Sun. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

I can't recall her name, but I remember her face.

Her sneering countenance made seventh grade miserable.

Seventh grade was hard enough on its own, what with all those firsts.

It was a first for seeing busloads of kids whose faces and siblings I did not know. It was a first for lockers, seeing boys as something other than icky and gym classes with uniforms, group showers and deodorant.

Suddenly, clothes mattered. Physical appearance mattered. Everything seemed bigger, scarier and more important than it ever had.

And adding insult to the injury of it all was a girl whose sole purpose in life was to make my life unbearable with a single word.

"Radar."

She said it because I wore the wire-rimmed granny glasses typical in the early 1970s. For the rerun challenged, Radar was the nerdy young company clerk in "M*A*S*H."

It wasn't the character. It was the way she said it. Loud, derisive and constantly. In the lunchroom, in homeroom, in the hall, out on the softball diamond, in front of people. She laughed. They laughed.

I wanted to die. I tried explaining it to my parents and older brother. But they couldn't understand how such a simple, silly thing could be so bad. They had real problems, after all.

"Radar."

Grades dropped. Math no longer made sense. English was no longer my easy A. I was upset and angrier than I'd ever been.

But angry enough to shoot her? Never. Such a thought never entered my mind. My father owned a couple of handguns. I probably saw them three or four times in my whole life. I didn't know where he kept them, and I didn't care.

I'd have done anything to make her stop teasing, but anything physical was unthinkable.

"Radar."

Self-doubt. Helplessness. Worthlessness.

It's been almost 30 years, but I want to remember those feelings. I want to remember because last Monday 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams killed two people and wounded 13 others at his California school. Two days later a 14-year-old Pennsylvania parochial school student shot and injured a classmate.

Both teens reportedly had been the ongoing targets of teasing by their peers. Some news reports even described Williams as "scrawny" in the very first sentence. People are dead, and we still don't hear.

Since 1997 children begging to be heard have killed 29 classmates and nine adults and wounded at least 92 people.

We don't hear them because schoolyard taunts aren't murder motives when you're an adult and you don't face them every single day.

So we are again mired in debates over metal detectors and gun control. We're wallowing in lists of "warning signs." We're desperate for solutions.

"Radar."

Could we be looking in the wrong places? Maybe the solution isn't found by studying what we face now. Maybe it lies with adults recalling how we felt back then and figuring out what kept us from doing the unthinkable.

Remember how this sort of thing used to be unthinkable?

"Radar."

No matter how much it hurt.