April 20th, 1999 was my 17th birthday. It was also the day the unimaginable happened. In Columbine, CO, thirteen students and one teacher lost their lives, 24 students were injured and many more were mentally changed forever by gun violence in a place where they were supposed to feel safe; their school. My friends and I began to imagine if it happened at our school. What would we do, where would we hide, where would we run.
Sadly, it did not end there. Instead, in 2012 we were forced to imagine it happening to kids as young as six. From 2012 on, we were forced to imagine it when we went to movies, restaurants, concerts, outdoor festivals, parades, places of worship and even the grocery store.
For me, May 24th, 2022, hit the hardest. When 19 fourth graders and two teachers lost their lives and 18 others were injured in Uvalde, TX. That was the day I had to think about the future of my own child, then two years old. I realized that he would learn that there were bad people in the world that could hurt him, not from me when he was older, but three years from then when he would participate in active shooter drills in kindergarten or even earlier.
Now every time I see a post on a local Facebook group about bullying taking place in the middle school, I imagine it happening here. I think about how I need to get through the produce section in the front of the grocery store as quickly as possible, about quickly getting my son out of the front of the cart without his feet getting hung up in the leg holes in order to run. I think about not standing by tall buildings on a parade route. Today, as I try to write this while being constantly interrupted by “Mommy look at this”, I imagine the parents who would give anything for the interruption of their child again.
Mothers today have to imagine if today will be the day their child doesn’t come back from school, they unpack their children’s backpacks to find drawings and imagine if that was the last memory they had of their child, they imagine quitting their jobs in order to homeschool their child, they imagine moving their family to a different country for the safety of their children. Students imagine daily if that will be the day it happens to them, young kids imagine hiding and keeping their light up shoes from going off, and covering blinking insulin monitors, running and climbing out windows if it happened to them. Yet on March 27th the headlines of the 376th school shooting since Columbine, read “Unimaginable”.
It should not be unimaginable, to anyone anywhere in this country. What should be unimaginable is that as I write this four days after the most recent school shooting, as yet again mothers are planning their children’s funerals, my TV is not constant coverage of what we are doing to solve any part of this issue. Six people lost their lives in a school, and the story can’t even dominate the news cycle for six days.
Students are protesting in Tennessee’s capital because the adults can’t get anything done and are becoming immune to it. Students are imagining it because we refuse to imagine it ourselves. So today I beg of you, IMAGINE IT, not as someone else’s child but yours. Because all children are ours.
These children were our future teachers, doctors, artists, scientists, authors, politicians, police officers, chefs, babysitters, hairstylists, contractors and so much more. These children were our future and now because of our inaction, they don’t have one.
So today, please, consider some of these actions to help solve the problem:
Write or call your local and state politicians and push them for action on something, whether it be:
- calling for an assault weapons ban or red flag laws
- for the formation of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention to study this issue and solutions
- more funding for mental health care in schools
- to push for a bill that bans the media from giving details about the shooters in these scenarios in order to remove the notoriety aspect these shooters crave
These are things we should all be able to get behind. Imagine it because our children’s future and ours depends on it.
