We remember 20 years ago this week. I was in sixth grade at the time.
This is right as the internet was becoming ubiquitous but before cell phones and laptops were common among teens.
Before 9/11 and compounded existential dread. Back in some kind of national innocence.
These were the death bed years for the still-popular Big Nightly News Anchor and the first wisps of a convoluted national discourse that had little arbitration or guidance.
The news spread slowly at first and then faster. And then, it was all anyone could talk about. For weeks, it was The Subject, and yet, for all the talking, nothing coming out of it as the “conventional wisdom” made any sense.
Everyone was on edge, and our leaders did nothing.
But it wasn’t because there was nothing there to offer in the way of sense. It was, instead, a lot of adults in power looking for anyone and anything but themselves to blame.
It seemed no one wanted to take responsibility.
The “conventional wisdom” offered: Violent video games and Marilyn Manson and trench coats and goth culture. Because they were bullied. Because they had bad parents. Because they were stoners or loners or geeks.
If these things were truly factors in the massacre, they’re so relatively insignificant to the actual cause that it would be like watching someone intentionally get run over by a car and our leaders responding by offering prayers and blaming the price of gas.
It was 20 years on Saturday since Columbine, and what continues to disturb me (and countless others) is how normal this all now seems compared to how it used to feel.
The first victim at Columbine was Rachel Scott. She was buried in a white casket, which mourners covered in messages of love. One was a gentleman over which she held an umbrella while he changed a car tire. Another was a fellow student who felt a little less alone because she was kind to him.
In the last 18 months of her life, Scott had written up a code of ethics that prioritised leading with compassion. This child had decided she would walk through life with kindness.
She was shot four times, the last bullet killing her instantly.
That hurt.
So did Virginia Tech.
So did Sandy Hook.
So did Parkland.
Nothing’s been done. I have long ceased being shocked, only saddened.
I want to feel shocked again if only to be reassured that there’s enough collective empathy and urgency to get something done instead of going through these periodic news cycles of mass shootings that are as routine as quarterly finance reports.
It scares me how numb I now am to these incidents.
Six days after the Christchurch massacre, the Prime Minister of New Zealand announced a ban on semiautomatic firearms. That legislation was passed last week. It has barely been a month since that terrorist attack.
Twenty years versus a month, and we wonder why other countries mock us when we claim to have the definitive answer to what “freedom” means.
I turn 33 this year, and many of my friends the same age have young children. Soon, they’ll be in grade school.
Twenty years, and the dread has never left us.