New Beginnings

Yesterday morning I woke up for the second time in a week to hear about a shooting in the USA.

I’d performed my usual habit of checking social media while I’m waking up in bed, but almost instantly, eyes foggy with sleep, I’d seen repetitive tweets about a tragedy at a Connecticut elementary school. Words jumped out at me: “shooting”, and “massacre.”

“Oh no,” I thought. “Oh no.” A sense of panic struck.

I gasped something at my fiancé about what I’d read. Flew out of bed. Turned on the first news channel my tired brain registered on the TV guide. There was so much to catch up on, and I desperately scanned twitter and Google reports while listening to a sheriff give a statement from outside the picturesque school in Newtown, Connecticut.

As I absorbed the awful details about a gunman opening fire on a kindergarten classroom, what shocked me most wasn’t what the reporters were saying, but rather what my own brain wasn’t. Vaguely I felt the nudge that I should be horrified. Disgusted. Saddened. But I was strangely disconnected from it all… not at all surprised and significantly unphased by the events.

It wasn’t until I watched President Obama’s tearful address that the conscious awareness of a tragedy connected with my emotions, and the full weight of it finally sunk onto me. Crying as I my eyes followed the line running across the screen that read “at least 18 children believed dead”, I realized what made this event so horrible wasn’t just the massacre itself but the fact that this was becoming so commonplace in America that I was almost desensitized to it.

I wondered how many other people felt the same way. It’s one thing to watch fictional movies or TV shows where people are being murdered and remain unaffected, but to have it actually occur, and have children- essentially babies- lose their lives and feel no emotional stir is something else entirely.

And then one news channel was interviewing a man whose sons had survived Columbine. His testimony of their interactions with one of the shooters was unsettling. So was the survivor of Virginia Tech speaking about his experience with the massacre. But what I found to be more disturbing was the fact that the Columbine High School shootings took place in 1999. And Virginia Tech, well that was back in 2007. Yet still, here we are, in 2012, about to cross the bridge into 2013, and we’re still talking about these events, and still interviewing these people, because their stories are still relevant in the worst way: they directly connect to a modern world that has experienced almost no real change since.

Columbine was a tragedy; thirteen people were murdered and it should never have happened. But it did, and what did the USA really learn from it? Not much clearly, because less than ten years later the worst school shooting in American HISTORY struck Virginia Tech with thirty-two students and teachers killed (and seventeen injured). And now in Connecticut almost thirty more innocent people have lost their lives, twenty of whom were under ten years old.

What will it take for a change to occur? How many car accidents at an intersection will it take for the city to put a set of lights in? Or even a temporary stop sign?

It makes me sick and it’s an absolute waste. Just the realization that twenty families were notified today that their grade-school child will never return home is enough to crack even the stoniest hearts.

SO THIS IS WHAT I LEARNED TODAY: that it’s important to stop TALKING about the past and start LEARNING from it. Remembering is not the same as reliving, and there should be a very clear distinction between the two. We don’t observe Remembrance Day to project the war propaganda that was put out at the time; instead the day exists to remind us of the huge number of lives lost on all sides so we never, ever let it happen again. So we forget the glory and lies of war and remember the truth of it: horror, mass destruction, and death, death, death.  So our children and our children’s children, and children’s children’s children never forget the lesson our ancestors learned the hard way last century.

These school shootings should be handled in almost the same way; Columbine and Virginia Tech, and even Aurora shouldn’t only be remembered when something similar happens… they should be talked about and remembered every day so that no one ever forgets the pain we suffered and the lessons we learned from those awful occasions. So we can recognize the patterns and mistakes that lead up to the tragedy and stop them in their tracks before they have a chance to occur again.

I’m not going to pretend that I have some sort of infinite knowledge of American gun laws or amendments; I don’t, and I’m not an American, so I understand that that somewhat disconnects me from the situation. But in reality we’re all people, we’re all connected regardless of what side of the border we reside on, and so this tragedy affects all of us. American lives weren’t lost, children’s lives were and something needs to change to stop this from ever happening again.

It’s said that history has a habit of repeating itself; like the economic cycle of prosperity and recession things ebb and flow, but a selective significant event like the mass murder of students should not be one of them. We shouldn’t have to sit and prepare ourselves for the inevitable occasion that this happens again; we shouldn’t wonder which of these survivors will be speaking to the news about their experience during the next tragedy. This should be it. The last time.

It’s a simple concept that one can apply to any area of life: learn from the past, and use the knowledge to change the future.

A little lesson from life’s imperfections.