Brendan Quealy: No end in sight to this cultural cancer
May 26—I spent three of the four years I taught journalism to college students requiring them to read David Cullen's "Columbine."
The 2009 recounting of the 1999 massacre at a high school in Littleton, Colorado, is a masterclass in reporting, writing and storytelling.
As graphic and difficult as it is to read at points, I felt it important to expose my students to what journalism can be, what it should be, what they could be, and what they should aspire to be.
The subject matter wasn't the point.
Granted, the shooting at Columbine High School and the 15 lives lost that day marks one of the most significant days in American history. And as we get further away from that fateful April 20, recently passing 23 years, few current college students and I'd venture to say no high school students were alive that day.
But obviously and unfortunately and heartbreakingly so, those born after Columbine still have lived through tragedy after tragedy as school shootings and mass shootings have embedded themselves as a norm in American culture.
We saw that stark realization Tuesday.
May 24, 2022, will now be another date added to the list of these horrific moments — joining the likes of April 20, 1999, and December 14, 2012, and February 14, 2018, and November, 30, 2021.
The first reports out of Uvalde, Texas, were that 14 students and one teacher had been killed. As of this writing, the deaths increased to 19 students, two teachers and the shooter's grandmother.
Not long ago, I wrote a column after the November 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in which four people from our very own state were killed. I wrote about the fear I had as a journalist going to cover high school basketball games after the Parkland massacre. The "what ifs?" that crossed my mind. Specifically, what if it happened right here, right now?
That is a normal and reasonable worry, today. How could it not be? Nowhere is immune to this epidemic of senseless and preventable violence.
Because of that — and because we've seen time and time again that nothing will be done to fight this deadly cultural disease — we will be grieving more lost lives at the bloodied hands of another mass shooter a few months down the road. Maybe even weeks or days.
We will add another date to that list and then another and another. Lives will go on. The news cycle will latch onto another story and only bring up these tragedies when the anniversaries, and I hesitate to use that word, come around.
The 10-year mark of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary is just months away. I thought for sure that would be the breaking point for legislators and politicians, for the citizens of this country. I know it was my breaking point.
Twenty children killed. Shot to death.
Twenty.
I wept that day, and tears well in my eyes — tears I try to fight back — when I even talk about it now.
I wasn't strong enough Tuesday, and I'm not strong enough now to watch any coverage or read any reports or listen to any interviews.
We are being told not to numb ourselves, to feel the pain and use it to compel us to action. But numbing ourselves is a coping mechanism, a survival instinct when the body and mind are so indelibly wounded.
I can't bring myself to look at the broken family members of the victims, photos of them letting out guttural, visceral and involuntary screams as they learn their child is dead — the realization that Tuesday was the last morning they'd wake them from bed, get them ready for school and send them to a place they thought was safe. A place that should unquestionably always be safe.
My heart and soul cannot bear the pain anymore. Neither are healed from Sandy Hook, and I imagine neither ever will be as each and every one of these killings tears fresh wounds into both.
