Looking at Columbine

When two disturbed adolescents entered their high school armed with explosives and firearms, dressed in fatigues and trench coats, intending to kill hundreds of their classmates and teachers and destroy parts of their own school building on April 20, 1999, I remember exactly where I was. I was a senior in my own high school and I had just gotten home when my friend had called to tell me to turn on the television. She said there had been another school shooting. So what's the big deal? Such news stories were pretty common at the time. Actually there had been about ten in the country in the previous three years, but all resulting in much more hype in the actual idea of students harming their peers and teachers than anything else. But this was different. This was pure tragedy.

When I turned on the TV I discovered live coverage of an entire high school student body somewhere in America that had spent its school day hiding under desks and chairs and tables, shaking in fear, saying their last words, and watching their friends get blown away, left to die in pools of blood. This was another school shooting, but this was much more than that. This was incredible fear. This was trying to find a reason that wasn't there. A reason that never would show up, either.

Since then schools have changed. Even the tiny five hundred -student rural high school that I attended now locks its doors all day and requires all visitors, even parents, to wear a visitor's badge upon entry. Many schools have numbered their doors and installed metal detectors to assist emergency response teams and security.

When I look at the pictures of Columbine on the internet and read articles related to it, I am quickly brought back, not just to that day, but to the whole subculture of high school. I recognize the names of bands on t-shirts the students are wearing in the pictures, and the styles of clothing, the makes and models of cars that were typical of all of us when we attended high school nearly eight years ago. It brings a flood of reality to me because I was a part of all of that. I listened to that music and knew all of those inside words and phrases that seem so irrelevant now, yet then were so incredibly important.

I survived high school and today I am a parent myself; a parent who worries about how much television my daughter is exposed to and the sort of language used when others are around her. I now look back on April 20, 1999 completely come of age and completely shed of any exterior identities I thought I had to wear to get through it. And now looking back my heart aches even more, and not just for the victims, not just for the students who suffered in fear hiding under their desks and behind doors, but also for Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Their faces look so familiar-like the boy who just took my order at McDonald's, or the boy who lives next door and plays his car stereo too loud. They all carry the same helplessness, the same uncertainty, the same adolescence. And they all stand on the threshold, with an idea in their mind, and a heart full of fear over what they don't yet know. I couldn't recognize it on April 20, 1999 because I too had it shining on my face, and held it tight in my own fist. And today buried in my heart, beneath layers of new tragedies, is Columbine.