Tag: school shooting

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Once or For All

Some moments freeze the frame. With shock. With disbelief. With the sudden awareness that you’re living in History with a capital “H.”

The last flight of the Challenger.

The morning the Twin Towers fell.

Wednesday.

The images from the Capitol felt surreal – and yet too real. Something that could have come from a movie or a Tom Clancy novel, and yet something that could have only happened in the far-too-real world.

Something that’s ours. Whether we want it or not.

As I write this, it’s been three days since the storming of Congress. We’ve seen and heard so much – the evacuation of Congress and delay of the vote, the staffers whose quick thinking got the ballot boxes to safety, the bizarre sights from the broken-into chambers and offices. We’ve heard the shouts and screams since, seen the calls for accountability, witnessed the beginnings of consequences in the real and online worlds.

By the time this appears in print, another two days will have passed. An eternity. Because the weird thing about frozen-frame moments is they move surprisingly quickly in their aftermath, fast enough to make even the most prescient observations quickly obsolete.
So I’m taking a step back from the immediate. And asking a bigger question.

What do we want this to be?

Not “How do we spin this?” Not “How do we assign blame?” Not even “How do we get in a DeLorean and prevent this from happening,” though I wish that were an option.

No. What will this be?

I’ll explain.

One of my own frozen-frame moments – one for many of us, I suspect – goes back more than 20 years to the mass shooting at Columbine High School. My mother was still a teacher at the time at a school with a very similar name, which meant that as I watching events unfold in a Kansas newsroom, I was also having to reassure friends that she was OK, that she wasn’t at that Columbine.

It was a punch in the gut. And for some years afterward, any fresh report of a major school shooting hit that wound. More than once, I went to the keyboard to pour out the pain of what had happened, to try to understand, to try to be even the smallest part of helping our country say “Never again” and mean it.

Well.

You know the rest.

They kept coming. They became so common that I couldn’t write about every single one. It took the classroom dispersals of COVID-19 to interrupt the string – March 2020 was the first March without a school shooting since 2002.

So common that it began to numb.

And the frame kept freezing a little less.

So I ask again – what will Wednesday be?

Will it be a 9/11, a one-time horror that leaves an impact but no immediate sequel?  

Or will it be a Columbine, merely the first of a chain?

Ultimately, that’s up to us.

A professor of mine, Simone Chambers, once said the fundamental principle of politics is that talking is better than fighting. It’s a simple concept to state and an easy one to abandon. After all, a conversation takes two willing people. Conflicts, like car accidents, require only one behaving badly.

Can we commit to talking? To listening? To hearing?

That doesn’t mean being a milquetoast, rolling over rather than risk offense. If anything, it requires the courage to stand up to folks who would trample on the conversation and say “No. We don’t do that here.”

Conflict is not unique to this time and place. American politics has never been an episode of Masterpiece Theatre. But we have been better. We can be. We must.

Freeze the moment again. Examine it.

And then, together, let’s decide what we want to learn.

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Another’s Story

This week, I wanted to be teasing the royal family about their new arrival, Archie, and ask if Prince Jughead was next.

Didn’t get to.

Or maybe I could be celebrating and lamenting the Colorado Avalanche season gone by, with so much accomplished on the ice and so much left to do.

Uh-uh.

Heck, at any other time, falling back on Mother’s Day would be a valid plan.

But not this week.

This week, we had it all shatter again. Death in a place that’s supposed to be safe. Violence where it shouldn’t be. A lost child celebrated for heroism when his family only wanted a graduate.

School shootings are my least favorite topic. But it’s one that keeps coming back. And it has a way of erasing everything else that crosses its path, leaving no one sure what to say.

So this time, I’m going to start by saying nothing.

***

It sounds unnatural, I know. When someone is grieving, we want to help. We’ve all seen it – or done it – so many times: this friend helps a hurting neighbor clean things up, that one helps get them where they need to go, and everyone brings them dinner.

It’s one of our best traits. It’s what makes us a community instead of a bunch of people that just happen to live together.

And like any good trait, it can be taken a step too far.

Because what we also try to do, so often, is tell our story.

“I had a cousin who went through the same thing …”

“Oh, my gosh, I remember when that happened to me …”

“I bet I know exactly what you’re feeling right now …”

It’s natural. It’s human.

And unless it’s invited, it’s also taking over. All of a sudden, if we’re not careful, we’re making someone a spectator to their own grief while we make it all about us.

The best help starts by listening.

It’s hard. We don’t like silences. Or unanswered questions. Or pain.

But the pain of grief lives in a sacred space, a time and a place set apart. A time and a place for the one who’s living it.

It’s a space they can fill with their memories of what happened, their need to examine the details again and find their place in it.

It’s a space they can fill with their memories of who they’ve lost, reminding themselves and the world around them of the treasure that was here.

It’s a space they can fill with their anger. With their hurt. With their uncertainty. With their need. And (with time) their hope.

And yes, it’s a space they can fill with silence when they need it.

When we enter that space, we’re not the author. We’re the audience.

That’s challenging enough when the pain is a private, local one. It becomes even more so when it’s something so public that re-opens so many of our national wounds. There are issues that have to be dealt with, alternatives that need to be discussed, policies that need to be addressed – if only because it seems like we can never get anyone talking about them at any other time.

Those are conversations we need to have as a nation. They shouldn’t be delayed.

But we still need to respect the space.

Those who are at the center of all this have their own stories, their own priorities and needs. They’ll join that conversation if and when they choose to do so. If it’s forced on them – from any side – they have every right to say “not here, not now,” just as they did at a recent vigil.

Our hearts may break at their grief. But it is their grief. We don’t own it, any more than we own the new royal baby just because Harry and Meghan let us share a piece of their joy.

“A time to keep silence and a time to speak,” the old verse goes. We have our time to speak, in abundance. And I don’t doubt we’ll fill it.

But remember the silence. Remember to listen. Remember whose story this is.

If we don’t have the words – maybe they were never ours to begin with.