TRIGGER WARNING
This post is about school shootings. I wrote this on December 1, 2021, shortly after learning about the school shooting in Oxford, Michigan which left four students dead. I put it aside until now, not knowing if I’d share it (some things I need to just get down on paper for my own well-being). So why now? It’s been weeks since the shooting and the country has moved on. The victims have not. They are spending their holidays with an empty chair at the table, an empty stocking on the mantle, and empty shoes at the door. I am reminded of them as I spend my Christmas alone with my family, quarantined with covid. Our plans are canceled, but they can be rescheduled.
. . .
When I was in junior high I saw my first musical: Miss Saigon. I fell quickly in love with the male lead, “Chris,” thereby beginning of my obsession with all things Vietnam War (morbid, I know). By freshman year I was (in my mind) a full blown hippie, listening to Creedance and Barry McGuire and pissed off at a president long dead. I couldn’t get enough of the music and particularly loved Four Dead in Ohio. I was so taken by Kent State, knowing that what happened there was inherently wrong; students shouldn’t be shot down, and especially not at their own school. It was unthinkable.
By my senior year in high school that idea was completely obliterated.
It was my junior year and I was in pre calculus when we heard the first ambulance and police sirens flying by the school. The rumors had already spread about the shooting at a nearby high school. We sat in shock trying to think of who we knew that went there: we all knew someone. We were attending a Catholic school and had many friends from elementary school who had then gone on to the public high school: Columbine. Not to mention neighbors, family friends, cousins, teammates, acquaintances… we all knew someone.
No one had cell phones at the time. If you were lucky your parents left you with a car phone… if you had a car. None of us could contact our families and nobody knew quite the extent of the shooting. Nobody was getting news, except maybe the staff, and they weren’t sharing anything with us. We had to go throughout our school day as normal and wait until we got home to find out what happened.
My honors Spanish teacher, Señora Bolton told us to “reza por ellos” and we were sent home. I heard murmurs of rumors: “she was at lunch when it happened,” “his girlfriend goes there and ran all the way here.”
I don’t remember driving home. I know it was my best friend’s birthday and I went to her house with a few friends. We brought her balloons from a woman who cried and asked if they were for the victims. I remember watching who I now know was Patrick Ireland, half paralyzed, throw himself out the second floor window onto the roof of a waiting ambulance.
We slowly began to hear names of victims, friends of friends, former classmates. It was unthinkable.
That was then.
School shootings are no longer “unthinkable” or even “uncommon.” So far this year there have been 34 shootings that took place in a school. And unfortunately we as a country are becoming numb. And I can understand the sentiment. I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of marching and signing petitions and watching another school shooting as nothing changes. I’m tired of being triggered, of wishing I could change things, of trying to change things. America is what it is. Guns are here to stay, and so are school shootings. This is the price of freedom. And it pisses me off more than a long dead president used to.
English poet Brian Bilston wrote a poem after a particular shooting (can’t remember which…they start running together) entitled “America is a Gun,” and its devastating honesty resonated with me :
https://medium.com/poem-of-the-day/brian-bilston-america-is-a-gun-e6a52d97c8d9
This is how much of the world sees us. And many Americans are probably proud of that fact… the second amendment and freedom and being big and powerful and scary… I personally would rather have a culture that didn’t list school shootings among its unique characteristics. But… freedom is freedom
So too when it comes to the pandemic. As other countries look to lockdown for the third or fourth time, America carries on and comes to terms with the fact that we are not the kind of country that will give up our personal freedoms for the good of the community. I’m astounded by the amount of people who think wearing a facemark is equivalent to the murder of six million jews during the holocaust, but “OK, Boomers. Cry me a snowflake.”
I’m still the same girl that wanted to fight the government for sending kids into combat; who was convinced adults didn’t understand the youth of my day; who was eager to stand up for a cause she believed in. Columbine presented the cause and I sure as hell wasn’t the only one to jump up and say “no more; never again.” And then again. And again. And when five year old were murdered in their kindergarten we thought surely this time something will change. 23 years since Columbine and nothing has changed except the safety drills our children are now required to learn. Because we have failed them. We have failed to pass common sense gun control measures to make them safer in their own schools. It is up to them to learn to protect themselves and up to us to “think and pray.” This is the cost of so-called freedom to bare arms: the sacrifice of our youth; the loss of a carefree childhood; the worry that someday our child might now return home to us. And it’s not a cost any of us would be willing to pay.
StigMama 