I Remember

Normally I write deep-seated blogs on my personal blog, but MySpace is wigging out on me, so I had to use BlogSpot. I'll go back to happier ones next time...


I just recently finished a very engrossing novel, Nineteen Minutes. It is a fictional story about the horrors that follow a school shooting. Reading it, I felt like I was watching the whole thing unfold on CNN. Coincidently, I finished it on the tenth anniversity of the Columbine shootings. I've watched a bit of the memorial coverage from that day and I still cannot believe it's been that long. I still remember that day very vividly...

I was in 6th grade. My science teacher walked in the room and announced that a tragety had just happened in Littleton, Colorado. News was shaky at the moment, and they estimated 25 kids had died. Fortunatly it wasn't that much, but we learned later that 12 kids and one teacher had been murdered.

Suddenly, school had become a scary place. The goth kids and the rebels were looked at funny...were they crazy enough to kill the rest of us? I remember panicking once because I didn't realize that I had a knife in my bag left over from a camping trip. The knife fell out and a girl completly freaked out when she saw it. I had to beat her to the principal's office so I could turn it in myself before she thought I was a killer or something...

There was one girl who had this supposed "hit list". Rumors spread about it, how all the popular kids were on it. A lot of kids were kept home for a few days, myself included. While the school claimed there was never a list, we saw the girl in handcuffs, taken away, and never heard from again.

Columbine sparked my obsession, which turned into a passion, for the news. I watched coverage obsessively, trying to understand why. In watching all this news, I learned that I lived in a scary world...yet decent people still seemed to exist.

I feel Columbine to me was that bridge from childhood into adolescence. It was that step away from innocent bliss to awareness and acceptance. I could never forget. I don't want to. I would hope I would never be involved in something so tragic and that my future kids will feel safer in school then I did.