Friday, 4.20.18
36 years old
188 pounds
Denver, CO
On April 20, 1999, I was in a high school in downtown Rome, Italy. As part of a student learning program for Italian language students in the city of Boston, a handful of us from three different schools were flown to Italy for a nine-day tour of the country. We saw the canals of Venice, the art museums of Florence, and the ruins of Rome. We stood on the banks of the Tiber River. We climbed to the cuppola of St. Peter's Basilica. We attended mass in the plaza of Vatican City with Pope John Paul II. We ate. Oh my God, did we eat.
This being a school trip, though, there were some responsibilities. We had to spend one day in an actual Italian high school, taking classes and sitting in lecture like every other Roman high school student our age. It was a challenge for two reasons. The first was that while we had been studying Italian for five years, NOTHING prepares one for the speed of the native speakers. The second was that the Italian high schoolers were DYING to talk to us. They stared at us with the sort of anticipation reserved for celebrities. When the first break in the day came at about lunch, we got rushed.
I remember the students closing in on us, practically losing their breath as they got close. "Che succede? Che succede?" What happened? They were nearly shouting the question at us, like a press conference swarm of reporters. We were able to understand two questions through their excitement and agitation - did school shootings happen often in America? What about in Colorado? We answered the first question with a sort of nervousness. We supposed that shootings happened maybe some times in larger urban schools, like in LA or New York, and we told them of an incident that had taken place at our own high school in Boston just four years earlier. What about in Colorado? Nothing bad ever happened in Colorado, we laughed. Colorado was, to our very narrow minds, a lily-white and perfect little mountain state, away from all the day-to-day shit and misery and poverty and drug use we saw in downtown Boston. We could see the frustration in the faces of the Italians. We hadn't answered their question well enough. On the way back to the hotel at the end of the day, we were all asking each other, "Why do you think they wanted to know so much about Colorado? That was weird."
And then we got to the hotel.
And then we saw the news.
And then our hearts split in half.
There was no Internet and we were in a foreign country. We had been hustled from our rooms in time for first period at a high school in Rome - we were hours ahead of the morning news cycle in the United States. We had been stuck in an Italian vocational school all day without cell phones, newspapers, televisions, or radios. We had no idea what had happened at Columbine. We had no idea thirteen kids, just like us, had been shot to death by two of their classmates. We had no idea.
Going back to school the next week was very strange. The previous week, the week that our handful of travelers was abroad in Italy, had been April vacation for all of us. Now it was Monday and we were all back together and you could tell that we were all sad, like you could feel it like a weighted vest and we all wanted to talk about what had happened, but none of us knew what to say. I remember slogging through the first two periods and then came my favorite class of the day with my favorite teacher, AP Composition and Language with Mary Colvario. It was a small class considering the size of the school - only nineteen of us. We were able to have freer conversations and being juniors at the high school, we were poised to take reign as kings and queens. The seniors were two weeks away from their release. So the class was a (normally) very freewheeling, very lively, very creative space. But not on that day. Santosh Ganesan was the first person to speak in class as we all came in and he asked a very simple question as we sat down in our discussion circle.
"Mrs. Colvario, do you feel safe today, or are you not okay?"
She tried, God bless her, to answer that question. She folded her hands like a prayer in front of her chest and rested them on the desk. Behind the lenses of her glasses, little tears pooled against her cheeks. She opened her mouth to answer Santosh, but what came out was barely a whisper and the only thing she could mutter was, "I don't know, I don't know." And then Mrs. Colvario was crying. And half of the class was crying. We spent the rest of the class talking about what had happened in Littleton, Colorado. We couldn't talk about anything else.
Years later, I became a teacher. In 2012, I found myself as an ELS instructor to international college-level students. They were from all over the globe and it was their hope to attend university in America. One of the topics covered in the advanced language classes dealt with school violence in the United States. There was a listening exercise about Columbine. The audio accompaniment included clips of 911 calls from inside the school as the shootings happened. There was a commentary from some political pundit in the days that had followed. Fifteen years later, I still got choked up when covering that unit. I told the students at the beginning of the term that when we got to that section, I was going to have trouble talking about it.
We listened to the audio clips.
One of my students from Saudi Arabia raised his hand.
"David, what would make someone do this?"
And like Mary Colvario had done years before, that brave and exemplary woman who showed a group of kids her real feelings and then guided us through a very difficult conversation about loss and grief and protection and anger, I started to cry. I had no other answer for my Saudi student besides, "I don't know."
I didn't know in 1999.
I didn't know in 2012.
I still don't know now.
Today is the nineteenth anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine. The memorial rally is being attended by thirty students from the Parkland school in Florida. These are students who themselves experienced and survived a school shooting. It is nineteen years later and we have not changed anything. We have not done anything. We have not improved anything. Maybe the reason Mrs. Colvario cried that day was borne of frustration at the lack of care shown to the loving students she saw every day. Maybe Mrs. Colvario cried that day because she herself was a parent and she knew, in her stomach, what the feeling would be should she have gotten the phone call that no parent ever wants to get. Maybe Mrs. Colvario cried that day because she was an empathetic and understanding human who was confounded and heartbroken by what had happened. Maybe Mrs. Colvario didn't know why she was crying that day because it was a pain too large to articulate. I don't know.
I can't believe that nineteen years after Columbine, we're all still looking at one another with tears in our eyes like we don't know. We don't know how to fight this problem or make kids safe without it turning into a screaming match about constitutional rights and what the left wants confiscated and what the right will die to defend. Lost in all that horrible noise are the names of the dead kids, and the hole in the lives of their families, and the gaps in our country's future that might have been plugged by a light extinguished too soon. So we come together and we mourn but ask us for a solution? I'm afraid we just don't know how to do that. It's clear that we don't even care enough to try.
36 years old
188 pounds
Denver, CO
On April 20, 1999, I was in a high school in downtown Rome, Italy. As part of a student learning program for Italian language students in the city of Boston, a handful of us from three different schools were flown to Italy for a nine-day tour of the country. We saw the canals of Venice, the art museums of Florence, and the ruins of Rome. We stood on the banks of the Tiber River. We climbed to the cuppola of St. Peter's Basilica. We attended mass in the plaza of Vatican City with Pope John Paul II. We ate. Oh my God, did we eat.
This being a school trip, though, there were some responsibilities. We had to spend one day in an actual Italian high school, taking classes and sitting in lecture like every other Roman high school student our age. It was a challenge for two reasons. The first was that while we had been studying Italian for five years, NOTHING prepares one for the speed of the native speakers. The second was that the Italian high schoolers were DYING to talk to us. They stared at us with the sort of anticipation reserved for celebrities. When the first break in the day came at about lunch, we got rushed.
I remember the students closing in on us, practically losing their breath as they got close. "Che succede? Che succede?" What happened? They were nearly shouting the question at us, like a press conference swarm of reporters. We were able to understand two questions through their excitement and agitation - did school shootings happen often in America? What about in Colorado? We answered the first question with a sort of nervousness. We supposed that shootings happened maybe some times in larger urban schools, like in LA or New York, and we told them of an incident that had taken place at our own high school in Boston just four years earlier. What about in Colorado? Nothing bad ever happened in Colorado, we laughed. Colorado was, to our very narrow minds, a lily-white and perfect little mountain state, away from all the day-to-day shit and misery and poverty and drug use we saw in downtown Boston. We could see the frustration in the faces of the Italians. We hadn't answered their question well enough. On the way back to the hotel at the end of the day, we were all asking each other, "Why do you think they wanted to know so much about Colorado? That was weird."
And then we got to the hotel.
And then we saw the news.
And then our hearts split in half.
There was no Internet and we were in a foreign country. We had been hustled from our rooms in time for first period at a high school in Rome - we were hours ahead of the morning news cycle in the United States. We had been stuck in an Italian vocational school all day without cell phones, newspapers, televisions, or radios. We had no idea what had happened at Columbine. We had no idea thirteen kids, just like us, had been shot to death by two of their classmates. We had no idea.
Going back to school the next week was very strange. The previous week, the week that our handful of travelers was abroad in Italy, had been April vacation for all of us. Now it was Monday and we were all back together and you could tell that we were all sad, like you could feel it like a weighted vest and we all wanted to talk about what had happened, but none of us knew what to say. I remember slogging through the first two periods and then came my favorite class of the day with my favorite teacher, AP Composition and Language with Mary Colvario. It was a small class considering the size of the school - only nineteen of us. We were able to have freer conversations and being juniors at the high school, we were poised to take reign as kings and queens. The seniors were two weeks away from their release. So the class was a (normally) very freewheeling, very lively, very creative space. But not on that day. Santosh Ganesan was the first person to speak in class as we all came in and he asked a very simple question as we sat down in our discussion circle.
"Mrs. Colvario, do you feel safe today, or are you not okay?"
She tried, God bless her, to answer that question. She folded her hands like a prayer in front of her chest and rested them on the desk. Behind the lenses of her glasses, little tears pooled against her cheeks. She opened her mouth to answer Santosh, but what came out was barely a whisper and the only thing she could mutter was, "I don't know, I don't know." And then Mrs. Colvario was crying. And half of the class was crying. We spent the rest of the class talking about what had happened in Littleton, Colorado. We couldn't talk about anything else.
Years later, I became a teacher. In 2012, I found myself as an ELS instructor to international college-level students. They were from all over the globe and it was their hope to attend university in America. One of the topics covered in the advanced language classes dealt with school violence in the United States. There was a listening exercise about Columbine. The audio accompaniment included clips of 911 calls from inside the school as the shootings happened. There was a commentary from some political pundit in the days that had followed. Fifteen years later, I still got choked up when covering that unit. I told the students at the beginning of the term that when we got to that section, I was going to have trouble talking about it.
We listened to the audio clips.
One of my students from Saudi Arabia raised his hand.
"David, what would make someone do this?"
And like Mary Colvario had done years before, that brave and exemplary woman who showed a group of kids her real feelings and then guided us through a very difficult conversation about loss and grief and protection and anger, I started to cry. I had no other answer for my Saudi student besides, "I don't know."
I didn't know in 1999.
I didn't know in 2012.
I still don't know now.
Today is the nineteenth anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine. The memorial rally is being attended by thirty students from the Parkland school in Florida. These are students who themselves experienced and survived a school shooting. It is nineteen years later and we have not changed anything. We have not done anything. We have not improved anything. Maybe the reason Mrs. Colvario cried that day was borne of frustration at the lack of care shown to the loving students she saw every day. Maybe Mrs. Colvario cried that day because she herself was a parent and she knew, in her stomach, what the feeling would be should she have gotten the phone call that no parent ever wants to get. Maybe Mrs. Colvario cried that day because she was an empathetic and understanding human who was confounded and heartbroken by what had happened. Maybe Mrs. Colvario didn't know why she was crying that day because it was a pain too large to articulate. I don't know.
I can't believe that nineteen years after Columbine, we're all still looking at one another with tears in our eyes like we don't know. We don't know how to fight this problem or make kids safe without it turning into a screaming match about constitutional rights and what the left wants confiscated and what the right will die to defend. Lost in all that horrible noise are the names of the dead kids, and the hole in the lives of their families, and the gaps in our country's future that might have been plugged by a light extinguished too soon. So we come together and we mourn but ask us for a solution? I'm afraid we just don't know how to do that. It's clear that we don't even care enough to try.
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