Safe.
I graduated from high school in 1995 - a Bradshaw Bruin: smart, somewhat ambivalent, and ready to get the hell out of my hometown. I was in the National Honor Society and the drama club. The worst thing I thought might happen to me at school was getting caught sneaking out to grab a burger for lunch or smoking in my car between classes. I remember a bomb threat being called in once, but it happened during exam week and we always assumed it was just a student who didn't want to take a test. Back then there were pay phones and caller ID was a pretty new feature, so we never really knew the truth. Home was safe; school was safe.
1999 was the year I was supposed to graduate from college, but I'd taken a year off in search of sanity, of myself, of my place in the world and I was easing myself back into school. I was a drinker and a night owl. I lived in a generic apartment complex with my best friend from high school, who was beyond patient with me as I sold dresses on commission at JC Penney and tried like hell to be a grownup. Cell phones were not particularly common in those days, but I had a pager. You could ignore a pager; you could lose yourself. You didn't have to call back.
I was asleep one afternoon. I don't remember what time, but it was well past time for a normal day dweller to be awake, and my mother paged me. The buzz seemed like such a loud alarm and I pressed the button to make the sound stop. A minute or two later, another page. Ignore. And then another and another. "What?" I snapped at my mother when I returned her call. It was a weekday and she was at work. She knew I was asleep. "Jesus, mom! What is it?" Her shaky voice came across the line, saying "People are saying that students have been killed at a high school in Colorado." I was completely confused by what she was saying. It didn't register. "I hear it's bad," she said. I was sleepy. This still didn't compute. It was a high school; it was safe.
Photo: Reuters
The internet in the 1990s wasn't an instant, all-access tool in the way it is today. I dragged myself to my massive computer and slowly waited for my Prodigy account to load and the long squeal and static of dial-up access connecting me to the "information superhighway". There were not many places online to find news back then, so I ventured into some AOL chat rooms. There was so much misinformation, but no one knew that at the time. People were saying there were 3,000 hostages, 100 students killed, that bombs and grenades were going off everywhere, that it was pandemonium. But no one really knew what was going on and, besides, this was a school. It was safe. Schools were safe.
I turned on the television and waited for it to warm up, the screen slowly lighting up with pictures of students running, some covered in blood, bodies being dragged through windows, kids on stretchers, and SWAT teams with weapons. It looked like utter chaos because it was. Twenty-four hour cable news was not widespread at the time - we only had CNN - and so that afternoon America watched as major networks broke into "Leeza" or "The Sally Jessie Raphael Show". The networks were broadcasting Denver news anchors live from the scene, desperately describing what they saw unfolding. There were no close-up shots of bodies because parents did not know where their children were. It looked like madness. But it was a school. Schools were safe, right? Hadn't they always been safe?
Photo: Rodolfo Gonzales
I switched the channel from network news to CNN. There was no protocol in place for broadcasting this type of event because this wasn't exactly a common occurrence. And so CNN hadn't gotten the no-gore memo, I guess. The bloody stuff, the worst of the worst was all there to see. Students were interviewed live. They were not debriefed, they were splattered with blood, and clearly in shock. Some were describing two students in black trench coats shooting indiscriminately, throwing grenades. Students were naming names on air, including the shooters' identities. I called my mom again and again to update her. I called my friends. I called everyone. I wanted desperately for this to make sense. This was a school; it was safe. It was safe. It was supposed to be safe.
Twelve students and a teacher died before the two gunmen killed themselves. Twenty-four other students were shot or wounded. We watched television and read the newspapers for days, hungry for more information and desperate to make sense of it all. It didn't make sense. School was supposed to be safe.
Photo: Zed Nelson
School shootings aren't covered by the media this way anymore. Neither are most mass shootings. When they are covered, we don't pore over the news every morning, searching for details. Supposed experts argue over how many school shootings there have been since Columbine. Regardless of the number, it's too many. Schools are sacred places - places of learning and growing up and having broken hearts and worrying about AP History grades. Schools are precious places. And they used to be safe.
My generation, "Generation X" was called the Latchkey Generation. We were supposedly apathetic and angsty; we were "Slackers", according to Richard Linklater. No matter what you called us, we did not know how to process what we'd seen. As far as we knew, this was a once-in-a-lifetime attack, a moment on the cultural radar. Today's youth - Generation Z, the Post-Millennials, the iGeneration - whatever we label them, have given themselves an unfortunate new moniker: the Mass Shooting Generation. Because they are not safe.
On February 14th of this year, Parkland, Florida, was the unfortunate and most recent host to a school shooting. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School lost 17 students, with 17 more wounded. This generation of students has lived an entire lifetime in a post-Columbine world. That blows my mind. Mass school shootings have been occurring for their entire lives. They've practiced active shooter drills in the same way that students learned "duck and cover" drills during the Cold War. A violent act that was once so absurd and so unthinkable to people like me is now considered possible, if not probable to these children. This is a school; it's not a safe space. For them, it's never been a safe space.
Student Alex Wind said, "The thing about it is, we are the generation that's had to be trapped in closets, waiting for police to come or waiting for a shooter to walk into our door. We are the people who know what it's like first-hand." As grown-ups, we are watching an entire coalition of students go toe-to-toe with public leaders and the National Rifle Association. It is inspiring and, sadly, their lives have prepared them to excel in just such a moment. They have to do it because we couldn't or we didn't or we wouldn't.
On February 17, 2018, Parkland student Emma Gonzalez gave an impassioned speech - an effective call-to-arms for the young people of America and a warning to leaders who fail to protect them:
"Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call B.S. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call B.S. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call B.S. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call B.S. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call B.S. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call B.S."
And so I have to call B.S., too. Because schools are supposed to be safe. Concerts are supposed to be safe. Restaurants and nightclubs and movie theaters are supposed to be safe and fun and normal. The Mass Shooting Generation is calling on Generation X not to be slackers; they are calling on Baby Boomers not to be dismissive; they are calling on all of us to use our voices and our votes. We've already failed them, you see. It is our duty to win back their trust and to respect ourselves again. Our inaction is the real Boogeyman, holding the door open for violent offenders. Get off your asses. Call B.S. - because none of us are safe and it's possible that only our children truly understand that.