Look at the Flowers

This Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO.  Even though there were a handful of school shootings prior to Columbine, but this was arguably the shooting incident that turned heads. This became a cultural event that pointed fingers at everything from Marilyn Manson to violent video games to overprotective parents. And yet, no one scolded the two mentally ill teenagers that shot over a dozen of their peers before turning the guns on themselves. Our anger and astonishment was misdirected. It still is.

I was in eighth grade when the shooting occurred. The students that were slain weren't much older than I was; at least one was just a few months older than me. I had a sarcastic, facetious streak then, and my parents warned me repeatedly to not joke about Columbine. I had no intention of doing so; even I was speechless, too appalled to comment in any way.

A few weeks before, the Columbine flower was discussed in science class. For the unfamiliar, the Columbine a boldly colored perennial in the buttercup family. It is also the state flower of Colorado, which has a dense population of the Columbine genus. Like the poppies in Flanders Field 80 years before, this unassuming plant is now forever associated with unspeakable bloodshed.

What really disgusts me two decades on is that Columbine was a beginning, not an end; a root rather than a stem. Mass shootings are almost an everyday occurrence, to the extent that American society is nearly and totally desensitized. There has been multiple school shootings even deadlier than Columbine. Politicians on both sides of the aisle keep wringing their hands. Common sense gun control has proven oddly elusive. The vicious cycle keeps spinning.

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