American Made

The image above turned twenty-three years old on April 19th. It shows a group of students standing outside of Columbine High School after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris laid siege to a student population, resulting in the deaths of twelve students and one teacher. Armed with semi-automatic rifles as well as several pistols and explosives, the teenagers roamed the halls and library of the school for twenty minutes before committing suicide.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department would later release a statement which read in part,

While our community struggles with (the question of why) and grieves those who were lost, we remain united in one hope—that our nation shall never see anything resembling the tragedy at Columbine High School again.

So much for that sentiment.

According to a recent article in The Washington Post, more than 311,00 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine, or more than six times the population of Littleton, Colorado for the sake of reference. The article goes on to say that there were more school shootings-42- last year than in any other year since at least 1999. So far this year, there have been 27 school shootings, which puts us on a pace to surpass that horrible mark. And the median age for these cold blooded killers? 16.

We are the culture of violence President Clinton once feared, spiraling downward from our darkest day and arriving at a point in time where grievances settled with guns has become a normative dynamic of our national fabric. Our kids were just taking their cue from the adults, who have moved the terrorist threat stateside. As of June 6, 2022 there have been more mass shootings than days on the calendar.

For all the souls whose tomorrows never came, their memories are being trampled by elected officials who play politics with mental health care and gun rights. After which they insist that the nightmarish tallies are a bigger mystery than the Ark of the Covenant. Meanwhile, we are decades removed from a grisly turning point and what’s even more frightening is the thought that we might be decades away from changing that course.

There’s a passage from Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels that reads like a modern day prophecy of this darkly complex age we’re living in. If he was around, I think old Jack would have lots to say about a republic that has lost its legs. And not for nothing, but I kinda think he would have learned the fiddle. For the irony.

“Pretty soon there’ll be a new kind of murderer, who will kill without any reason at all, just to prove that it doesn’t matter, and his accomplishment will be worth no more and no less than Beethoven’s last quartets and Boito’s Requiem– churches will fall, Mongolian hordes will piss on the map of the West, idiot kings will burp at bones, nobody’ll care and then the earth itself’ll disintegrate into atomic dust (as it was in the beginning) and the void still the void won’t care, the void’ll just go on with that maddening little smile of its that I see everywhere, I look at a tree, a rock, a house, a street, I see that little smile– That ‘secret God-grin’ but what a God is this who didn’t invent justice?–So they’ll light candles and make speeches and the angels rage. Ah but ‘I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter’ will be the final human prayer.”

Columbine High School took its name from the state flower of Colorado, a hardy perennial that holds its own against the elements. Its common name is derived from the Latin word for dove. The flower has been important in the study of evolution because of its ethereal ability to adapt. This delicate balance of beauty and strength is living proof that what doesn’t kill you will not only make you stronger, it will make you whole.

Adaptation is equal parts dynamism, cooperation and sheer will. It is not dependent on convenience and it has precious little use for indifference. It wins its future by remembering everything that came before. Whereas humanity skips history class in its bottom line quest for kingdoms, this delicate sweep of colors stays honest to its past.

Hell of a world, where flowers learn the lessons we miss and grow the generations we never get to see. It’s been twenty-three years worth of dying and our country remains stuck in that parking lot in Littleton, Colorado. And in all that time, it seems the only thing we’ve mimicked from the flower that named a school is the art of stillness. Because while this genus has proven expert at growing its future, we went in another direction.

We bury ours.