I have this newspaper from college that I've held on to for the last 12 years. Though I haven't looked at it in a long time I know it's there, in a box of mementos from my four years of college. The paper was printed shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings. It wasn't that particular event that made me keep the paper, but the article that it contained, about all of the tragedies my generation had grown up with. At the time the article was written the emphasis was on the most recent tragedy, the shooting at Virginia Tech that resulted in 33 deaths; September 11th; & Columbine.
I was ten, almost eleven, when Columbine happened. Before that there were a few events I remember seeing on the news or hearing about while catching snippets of adult conversation. The LA riots, the OJ Simpson case, the invasion of Kuwait. I was so young when these things happened that of course, at the time, I didn't understand them, but I do remember the images - the car chase, the broken storefront windows, the night-vision recordings of blasts of blinding light.
Columbine was probably the first event that I remember well, & that I remember having a visceral reaction to. I'll never forget the newscasts that played the same clips over & over again: Patrick Ireland falling through the broken window & landing on top of the armored vehicle, his blood smearing everywhere; the security footage of Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold in the cafeteria; teenagers sobbing & running & a triage center on the lawn in front of the school; blood on the sidewalk.
It was horrific. It still is. The images that followed, while less graphic, were no less wrenching. I remember the wooden crosses they erected for each victim, even the gunmen, & Daniel Mauser's dad carrying around his old sneakers. I remember Richard Castaldo in his wheelchair with his long, wavy brown hair; the home videos made by Harris & Klebold & the pictures of them in their trenchcoats. All the finger-pointing that went on afterwards. Blaming Marilyn Manson & Doom.
Most of all I remember thinking how horrible it was & how something like that could never possibly happen again. It was too terrible, too tragic to not be an anomaly. I wish I had been right. I wish it had remained a short chapter in the story of our country & not something that has now been relegated to the beginning of a longer volume of massacres that have happened since.
God, has it really been 20 years? How old would those kids be now? Some of them would've been not much older than I am now. And what do we have to show for it? More names, more places. Not just Virginia Tech, but Aurora, Newtown, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Boston, Charleston. And those are just the ones in this country & the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
And so many have happened in April, around the time of spring, of renewal, of Easter.
It has been an exhausting twenty years. There have been good things that have happened, of course, some wonderful achievements made by humankind. But these blips on the radar are the ones that stick out, even as they get more frequent & less shocking because of their frequency. It's hard to not feel numb when things like this happen, to not feel, well, nothing at all. To react to each tragedy with the same level of disgust & despair that I initially did to Columbine is hard, but I'd argue that it's necessary. It's from those feelings we can turn to action. For those of you old enough to remember April 20, 1999 think of what has changed & what has not since that day. What can you do to aid in the changes you'd like to see? It can be as simple as donating a few dollars, as sacrificial as dedicating time to a cause. For me the decision is to consciously raise my children, my sons, to be the antithesis of the perpetrators of these crimes. To be loving, to be humble, to be empathetic, to be strong.
Please remember the people who lost something to the Columbine massacre, especially those who are still healing.
I was ten, almost eleven, when Columbine happened. Before that there were a few events I remember seeing on the news or hearing about while catching snippets of adult conversation. The LA riots, the OJ Simpson case, the invasion of Kuwait. I was so young when these things happened that of course, at the time, I didn't understand them, but I do remember the images - the car chase, the broken storefront windows, the night-vision recordings of blasts of blinding light.
Columbine was probably the first event that I remember well, & that I remember having a visceral reaction to. I'll never forget the newscasts that played the same clips over & over again: Patrick Ireland falling through the broken window & landing on top of the armored vehicle, his blood smearing everywhere; the security footage of Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold in the cafeteria; teenagers sobbing & running & a triage center on the lawn in front of the school; blood on the sidewalk.
It was horrific. It still is. The images that followed, while less graphic, were no less wrenching. I remember the wooden crosses they erected for each victim, even the gunmen, & Daniel Mauser's dad carrying around his old sneakers. I remember Richard Castaldo in his wheelchair with his long, wavy brown hair; the home videos made by Harris & Klebold & the pictures of them in their trenchcoats. All the finger-pointing that went on afterwards. Blaming Marilyn Manson & Doom.
Most of all I remember thinking how horrible it was & how something like that could never possibly happen again. It was too terrible, too tragic to not be an anomaly. I wish I had been right. I wish it had remained a short chapter in the story of our country & not something that has now been relegated to the beginning of a longer volume of massacres that have happened since.
God, has it really been 20 years? How old would those kids be now? Some of them would've been not much older than I am now. And what do we have to show for it? More names, more places. Not just Virginia Tech, but Aurora, Newtown, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Boston, Charleston. And those are just the ones in this country & the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
And so many have happened in April, around the time of spring, of renewal, of Easter.
It has been an exhausting twenty years. There have been good things that have happened, of course, some wonderful achievements made by humankind. But these blips on the radar are the ones that stick out, even as they get more frequent & less shocking because of their frequency. It's hard to not feel numb when things like this happen, to not feel, well, nothing at all. To react to each tragedy with the same level of disgust & despair that I initially did to Columbine is hard, but I'd argue that it's necessary. It's from those feelings we can turn to action. For those of you old enough to remember April 20, 1999 think of what has changed & what has not since that day. What can you do to aid in the changes you'd like to see? It can be as simple as donating a few dollars, as sacrificial as dedicating time to a cause. For me the decision is to consciously raise my children, my sons, to be the antithesis of the perpetrators of these crimes. To be loving, to be humble, to be empathetic, to be strong.
Please remember the people who lost something to the Columbine massacre, especially those who are still healing.
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