I was in seventh grade in March of 1998 when Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden shot 15 people at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Arkansas. Four students and a teacher died.
I was just about to enter high school in the spring of 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher and shot another 21 people at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado.
I was a senior in college when Seng-Hui Cho systematically murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
I was married to a deployed soldier and spending a lot of time on an Army Base in November 2009 when Nidal Hassan shot and killed 13 people and wounded 29 others at Fort Hood in Texas.
And now this.
Even though I've never been to Norway and I'm not a teenager at summer camp, I can't help but feel, the way I've felt for these other victims, for the people of a country whose peace has been shattered in such a senseless and cruel manner. It's the kind of terrifying event that brings all those other memories that have been hovering, blurry, on the edges of my mind back in sharp focus.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess I’m in a dark and twisty mood. I suppose I just want to impress upon the world how much my generation has violence embedded into our collective memories. I grew up this way…with metal detectors and early-warning systems and shooting spree safety protocol. Like the old adage “duck and cover” from the Cold War but somehow much more sinister, we spent afternoons in high school practicing covering the window in the classroom door and locking it, shutting off the lights and building a sturdy barricade of chairs and desks to shield us from bullets.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I guess I’m in a dark and twisty mood. I suppose I just want to impress upon the world how much my generation has violence embedded into our collective memories. I grew up this way…with metal detectors and early-warning systems and shooting spree safety protocol. Like the old adage “duck and cover” from the Cold War but somehow much more sinister, we spent afternoons in high school practicing covering the window in the classroom door and locking it, shutting off the lights and building a sturdy barricade of chairs and desks to shield us from bullets.
Do our parents understand what that’s like? Going to school every day knowing it’s possible someone among your peers wants you to bleed to death on chipped tile?
Is it dramatic for me to say I felt the pain of these children, these young men and women, from hundreds or even thousands of miles away? I did. I wept and I forgot to eat and I couldn’t sleep for the nightmares of running feet and endless hallways and screaming pleas that haunted me. It hurt so badly. The anguish of strangers who lived just like I did broke something inside me...each and every time.
This kind of human connection is a powerful and bewildering thing. Is it an evolutionary trait designed to promote survival of the species? Is it a gift from a Higher Power to ease the pain of loneliness in an ever-expanding universe? Is it the result of individual brain chemistry and should be considered merely a personality quirk? Is it all of those things or something we have yet to define?
I have no answers.
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