Last Friday, my grandmother turned 103 and we all flew out to Florida once again to visit her. She lives in a town called Parkland, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale near Boca Raton. That may not have meant anything to anyone last year when we visited, but this year it is a little different, after the Valentine’s Day mass shooting that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High where 17 people were killed and seven more were wounded in one of the deadliest school massacres in our nation’s history.
All around town, you see people wearing shirts saying #MDSStrong and Parkland Strong. I had already made my mind up to go to the high school – I had no idea what I was going see. I was naïve. I thought I was going to see a high school, what I saw was so much more – a moment I will never forget.
What was there was one of the more moving memorials I have seen. Signs, and flowers, love, anger and defiance.
A banner with the 17 victims, the front lines with flowers.
A memorial with candles and flowers lining one of the entrances with the school building in the background.
A defiant sign with a message delivered about guns and weapons.
But it was the message of love that was delivered as well.
Not just love but multicultural love – the Jewish star with the Christian cross and the message: “Never again.”
The magnitude of the message was overwhelming. The memorial lines the campus – huge and sprawled. Even a month and a half later, dozens of people were coming to see, coming to pay their respects, coming to cry and mourn for the loss of youth and innocence.
We have seen huge marches against gun violence. We have been locally touched by the outpouring of students marching out of class to declare “enough.”
And yet, being at this site moved me beyond words. There I was with my mother on the one hand trying to explain to my eight-year-old daughter what had happened. And my daughter, while able to comprehend some of it, constantly wanted to know how the guy got into the school. Underlying that question, clearly, was the need to know whether it could happen at her school, whether she was safe.
That’s the problem. The first answer is yes – yes, we are safe in our schools. The chances of something this horrible happening at any single school is astronomically low. At the same time, the answer is no. No, you are not safe. Parkland looks just like Davis. It is a small town. It is affluent. It is well educated. And if it could happen at Parkland, it can happen anywhere.
That is the message that the youth are sending.
We have lived through tragedies like Columbine, like Sandy Hook, but this time, the reaction feels different. The anger is more persistent. The defiance more overt. And yet it feels like, soon, the world will return to normal and that business as usual will resume.
But for many, that time can never return to normal. The innocence of those student at MDS is shattered forever. They will never forget. For them, their lives are changed forever and the only question is whether they allow the darkness to grasp them and pull them under or whether they rise up and use this moment to ignite a movement that changes our nation and this world.
For me, being there was a moving experience. You read about tragedies. You cry. You mourn for the loss of innocent lives and pray it doesn’t happen again and that it doesn’t happen to you. But in many ways it becomes distant and remote.
Being there, walking around, seeing the reminders of lives snuffed out, of pain and tears, made it all the more real.
For my kids this is a moment that could be transformative. On April 20, there are supposed to more marches, more protests. Only, this time, my kids will have been there. They will have remembered all the pain that they saw and the moment will come alive, be all the more real.
My daughter is just eight. She couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of this, but she understood that something horrible took place here. It will be up to her generation to get this right. When the students march again on April 20, I will be there with them to help their generation through this moment.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
DG,
Moving piece, great pictures, especially the B&W of your daughter (I assume) looking at a memorial.
Reminds me much of when I came into Oklahoma City and found myself at the memorial to the building bombing there — set in the wrecked foundation of the remains of the building, with memorial chairs for each victim include small chairs for the children killed — at midnight with no one else around. The experience of being at a site where the darkest recesses of humankind are unleashed.
The most disturbing fact that people can’t wrap their head around is there is virtually nothing that can be done. Tens of millions of guns, hundreds of thousands of schools, a free country. Pass some laws and make guns a little harder to get? Yes. Learn from the blind eye turned by so many to a perp yelling his intentions to mass kill? Yes. Learn from the mis-assigning of a police officer to a job he couldn’t fulfill. Yes.
Still, it’s as impractical as stopping suicide on the Davis rail line. Build a fence? They’ll go to the end of it . . . fence it all? They’ll go to the station, or outside town, or jump off a bridge. Put guards out all along the line? Millions of dollars to stop an event that could occur anywhere along miles of line — zero or a few times a year? The other day a life self-taken 100′ from me outside my kitchen window as I made soup at 1:30 a.m., hearing the train braking, almost unnoticed in town, just one of three so-far this year, suicide by train. Cleaned up by sunrise, commuters by the hundreds running over where the body lay hours before, blissfully unaware.
Have two officers at each school? For an event that will probably never happen? Too expensive, no budget. Take away everyone’s guns in town? They’ll bring them in from the next town. Fence Davis High, and Junior High, and Elementary Schools? The perp will just wait for everyone to come through the gate at day’s end. Way less likely then death by car or lightning, but somehow still scarier.
Yet what seems somewhat a common thread here is anger and certain individuals who can’t handle it and see the solution as fame plus revenge — followed usually by suicide. Usually misfits. A modern twist to the last scene in “Revenge of the Nerds”. Returning often to the scene of their torture — a girlfriend who wronged them, years of societal torture, years of seething anger.
For some, nothing may change that. Maybe an understanding that compassion for the misfits is not only common decency, but that bullying and harassment could be fatal, to many. Occasionally. More often these days, it seems. A psychological contagion of revenge, fueled by Facebook instant fame.
I doubt fake compassion does any more good then bullying. Our society doesn’t exactly teach us how to deal with the misfits. And so often they return to the scene of the crimes, perpetrated bit-by-bit upon them, blowing one day, the next day — or years later with different children, even a different school.
So, teach your children well . . . their classmate’s hell . . . may not, slowly, go by . . .
Thanks Alan
Well written… much truth there…
Hi Alan,
“The most disturbing fact that people can’t wrap their head around is there is virtually nothing that can be done.”
I agree with and appreciate your comments about both memorials. David’s pictures were, for me, touching to the point of tears.
If you are talking about a panacea, I agree it does not exist. However, that does not mean that there is not much that can be done in terms of harm reduction, as in Yolo County at the public health level. Yolo county has an active program to address the underlying issue of misdirected anger and aggression both of which also correlate with various adult health issues so common in today’s society.
If you haven’t please check out the ACEs study and ACEs based programs to lessen the impacts of Adverse Childhood Experiences, especially the link I put in my article of this date.
Will do.
Great post by Alan, but I do think that one BIG thing that can be done is to get the media to stop giving so much coverage to these killers and making them famous (and making then seem like cool anti-heroes to kids with lots of issues)
I think most people that post here are old enough to remember the “streaking epidemic” of the early 70’s. It seems like every week someone was running out onto a field or in front of a camera and it got a lot of coverage (on the radio, on TV and in print).
Around the mid 70’s when the guy ran across prime time TV on the Academy Awards it seems like someone decided that giving these guys (often with NO WAR painted on their backside) and gals (often with ERA NOW painted on their frontside) was a bad idea and now at most events the camera goes away from the streaker and while it still happens it happens a LOT less than when it got a lot of coverage (and the media let people know this was a great way to get free media coverage).
Much agree. While I didn’t get into the details above (which you did well), that’s why I mentioned the contagion and Facebook fame aspects.
“get the media to stop” — any sentence that includes that phrase might as well be disregarded, since there is no way to “get the media to” do anything.
There was pressure to “get the media to stop” showing people smoking that worked well and pressure to “get the media to diversify” both have worked well and I can’t think of the last time my kids have seen anyone smoking on TV or in a movie and I don’t think my kids have ever seen a single white male MD on a cartoon or TV show in their entire lives (in the 60’s and 70’s it is hard to think of a movie or TV show without smoking and most MDs were white males). The broadcast and print media in America is struggling today and if people make it known that they are going to cancel their subscriptions or stop watching and listening next time they go wall to wall coverage on a school shooters “manifesto” (and show all his cool Instagram photos of him dressed in black with his guns) the media may not stop but they sure will put the brakes on coverage like they have been running since Columbine.
If you click the link below you can see that school shootings are not new, what is new is the wall to wall coverage of the shooter, their “manifesto” photos of the guys with guns and hours of interviews with politicians from the crazy left wingers who say now it the time to ban all guns since iw we make them illegal they will go away and the crazy right wingers saying that if every teacher had an AR15 on a sling they could easily take out the next shooter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
“Tens of millions of guns”
” Pass some laws and make guns a little harder to get? ”
According to the Congressional Research Service, there are more than 300 million guns in all. Let’s make ’em a lot harder to get.
” Our society doesn’t exactly teach us how to deal with the misfits.”
Sure it does. If we can’t drug them into early compliance with Ritalin, shun, shame and isolate them.
This rarely results in them going on to become mass murderers, but it could contribute.
Bottom line is that until we can admit that TOO F****** MANY GUNS is at the root of the problem, we just micturating into the maelstrom.
I’m sorry I must have miscounted. Let me start again . . .
One, two, three, four . . .