A Generational Trauma

Students react outside Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999

I will always remember the first day of the Bates College All-Sports Camp in the summer of 2000.

It was a warm late-June morning in Lewiston, Maine. My friend Joe and I were leaving the Roger Williams dormitory with our backpacks full of sporting gear. We had water bottles, a baseball glove, a frisbee, and, of course, our towel and bathing suit for the pool. We both shared an optimism about the upcoming two weeks. This was going to be our year. We were both fifteen years old and we would be placed in the Bobcat group, the group of oldest campers. We knew a few friends who would be already be in our group, but we also knew there would be some newbies. We were excited about the sports that we would play, the big day of competition known as Olympic Day, and all the various camp activities from beach day to mini-golf to the end-of-camp dance where the boys and girls would intermingle in the awkward way that teenagers tended to do. The first day of camp was full of hope and Joe and I were excited to see what this newest chapter would bring.

As we approached the meeting area, we were divided into our groups. The Bobcat group soon learned that our counselors would be Tom aka "Big T" and Emily, who just happened to be Joe's sister. Joe cursed under his breath but I couldn't help but laugh that he would have to be on his best behavior these next two weeks with big sister looking on! After our initial reactions to our counselors ceded, we sat in a circle and begin introductions with each person sharing where they were from. We had Joe and I from southern New Hampshire, a group from Acton, Massachusetts, a local resident from Lewiston, Maine and then we finally got to the last group member, a tall, gawky guy we had never seen before. He stood up, shyly and introduced himself by saying, "Hi, I'm Matt. I'm from Columbine."

Silence.

What had been an atmosphere of joy and anticipation suddenly got somber. The word itself was etched into our fifteen-year-old brains: Columbine. Less than 15 months prior, the high school in Littleton, Colorado had been shot up by two mass murderers leaving 12 students and 1 teacher dead. Students like Joe and I who attended a suburban high school of 2,000 students now all of a sudden had to give a second look to the quiet, shy kid wearing a trench coat to school. We got nervous around the goth kids and wondered if their pain would ever lead them to violence. I already knew that the next year I would be getting a ride from my neighbor to school because I had always felt uneasy on school buses. That uneasiness was magnified after Columbine when I suddenly realized that a large concentration of students stuck in a bus would be an easy target for a deranged kid with a gun. For the duration of high school, I would avoid the school bus whenever humanly possible. Yet to be here, in the present, with someone who had experienced the shooting firsthand was a shock to all of us. We didn't know how to respond. All we could do was nod and hope that somehow we could make camp endurable for Matt over the next two weeks.

Columbine may have been the beginning of my gun violence story but it was by no means the end. In April of 2007, I was student teaching in the town of Clemmons, North Carolina when I walked into the teacher's lounge during lunch to see coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. Watching a room full of lifelong educators sob and having my cooperating teacher demand that the TV be turned off is a moment that will haunt me for the rest of my life. There I was, a young, idealistic teacher worrying about classroom management and lesson plans and group activities and I had never once thought that my own life might one day be in danger. It was the sober realization that not only were public school teachers potentially in the line of fire but so too were college and university professors. While I always took seriously the rehearsed lockdown drills as a student, the Virginia Tech shooting made it abundantly clear that these drills may actually be needed one day to save my own life and the lives of my students. 

Flash forward four years and in 2011, I was working at a charter school in San Diego, California. It was our first year and we had roughly 40 students in grades 9-10. As we approached the end of the year, there was a mid-May day where students were leaving and I was in my classroom alone finishing up some grading. All of a sudden, I heard loud, abrasive screaming coming from down the hall and I heard the voice of our executive director rise to meet that screaming. Almost immediately, an announcement went on the loudspeaker with the two words I feared most: "CODE BLACK!" 

Code Black was the signal for the school to go into lockdown. I closed and locked both my doors and sat myself behind the teacher's desk, out of sight from either entry point. I immediately texted by work wife, Kellie, to make sure she was okay. While I did not have students with me, the same could not be said for Marcos, a bilingual teacher's aide who was in charge of monitoring the students after school in the cafeteria. These students were scared and one of them, Jonathon, began having a panic attack and headed toward the door. Marcos tried his best to restrain him but Jonathon was determined to leave and he shoved him, violently, out of the way and ran out the door past where the yelling had first been heard. Marcos, slowly recovering, stayed in the cafeteria and loudly and forcefully reminded the students that nobody was to leave. Yet in a time of lockdown, despite all the training, our school had a student panic and break protocol and end up placing himself and the entire student body in danger.

While the situation was eventually diffused with the irate parent taking her conversation outside and eventually the police called in, what struck me most was that this could have been much worse. The irate parent was not armed. But what if she had been? What if instead of her words she had used a weapon in her confrontation with our executive director? What if Jonathon leaving had shown her exactly where the bulk of the students were being held? As mentioned, we were a small charter school. We weren't part of the school district so we didn't have access to a school resource officer. We couldn't afford private security. We couldn't lock students in the cafeteria as that in itself would have been a huge safety and fire hazard. What I learned that day is that lockdown drills never fully prepared you for the reality of the situation. You can never fully know how people will react in times of crisis. And you can never fully know what can go wrong until it's too late.

I left the teaching profession three years later. But even today, I cannot get away from school shootings and violence. In September of this past year there was a school shooting at Mount Tabor High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mount Tabor was one of the high schools that sponsored student teachers and I have a good college friend who teachers there today. So you can imagine my fear and anxiety when it was reported that someone there was shot and no information about the victim was publicly available. I immediately reached out to my friend and luckily got assurances that he was okay. Like myself during my lockdown, it just so happened that my friend was fortunate enough to be alone in his classroom when their lockdown began. But while his friends were checking in on him, he was checking in on his students, texting them and making sure that they were okay. This was my friend's 15th year in the classroom and he had never expected that school violence would come to the very school he had been teaching at all these years.

The name of that friend at Mount Tabor High School? Matt.

Two Matts. Separated by 2,000 miles and 21 years of my life. Yet both permanently scarred by gun violence. Both forever changed by high school students with unfettered access to weapons of war. While I'd like to say that these events bookended my own personal experience with gun violence in classrooms, I simply cannot. I can't say that there won't be a third Matt down the road whose life will be put into danger by gun violence. Shoot shootings are who we are as Americans. Countless states have had multiple shootings. Texas alone has had 24(!) school shootings, one per year since the turn of the century. Aurora, Colorado has had two separate school shootings at two separate high schools, one in each of the last two decades. Parents now purchase bulletproof backpacks for their children. Teachers make up songs about lockdown to five and six year olds. We have a generation of parents whose biggest concern is not whether their child will skin their knee but whether or not they will have to show up to school to identify their child's mutilated body. 

This is the reality we face. The number of powerful, poignant social media posts I've read over the past 72 hours has made this hit home in a way that shows the continued impact on my generation. My friends who are teachers. My friends who are parents. My friends who are both teachers and parents. All of us stuck in this infinite vortex of helplessness. Knowing there's a clear and obvious problem. Knowing there's a clear and obvious solution to the problem. Knowing that no matter how tightly we hold our children at night that we will have to let them go the next day, getting on that bus or getting in that car and going to school. And knowing that once they get to that school we, or anybody else, can't protect them from something bad happening to them. That is every parent's worst nightmare. 

I don't have children of my own yet. It's always been a dream of mine to become a parent and to help raise someone better than myself. But I'm terrified. How can I bring a child or two into this world that cannot protect them? How can I send my own children off to school where they are at the mercy of a deranged gunman? My generation shouldn't have to think like this, but it does. It's been 23 years since Columbine. It's been 10 years since Newtown. It's been 4 years since Parkland. And now it's been 3 days since Uvalde. Nothing has changed. The fear is still there, nagging at our souls. We've spent half our lives knowing that our own and now our children's lives could be taken away in the blink of an eye. No matter what we do as parents at home, no matter how many drills they do in school, no matter how well the heroic teacher barricades the door, none of it can compete with a weapon of war. At this point in time, the one thing, the only thing, keeping our children alive is dumb luck.

Luck that will run out unless we find the courage to finally act.