Thread by @cmclymer

We remember 20 years ago this week. I was in sixth grade at the time.

This is right as the internet was becoming ubiquitous but before cell phones and laptops were common among teens.

Before 9/11 and compounded existential dread. Back in some kind of national innocence.

(1/x)

These were the death bed years for the popularity of the trusted Big Nightly News Anchor and the first wisps of an increasingly convoluted and bad faith national discourse that had little arbitration or guidance.

The news spread slowly at first and then faster. And then, it was all anyone could talk about. For weeks, it was The Subject, and yet, for all the talking, nothing coming out of it as the "conventional wisdom" made any sense.

Everyone was on edge, and our leaders did nothing.

But it wasn't because there was nothing there to offer in the way of sense. It was, instead, a lot of adults in power looking for anyone and anything but themselves to blame.

It seemed no one wanted to take responsibility.

The "conventional wisdom" offered:

Violent video games and Marilyn Manson and trench coats and goth culture.

Because they were bullied. Because they had bad parents. Because they were stoners or loners or geeks.

If these things were truly factors in the massacre, they're so relatively insignificant to the actual cause that it would be like watching someone intentionally get run over by a car and our leaders responding by offering prayers and blaming the price of gas.

It will be 20 years on Saturday since Columbine, and what continues to disturb me (and countless others) is how normal this all now seems compared to how it used to feel.

The first victim at Columbine was Rachel Scott. She was buried in a white casket, which mourners covered in messages of love. That hurt.

So did Virginia Tech.

So did Sandy Hook.

So did Parkland.

Nothing's been done. I have long ceased being shocked, only saddened.

I want to feel that way again if only to be reassured that there's enough collective empathy among our leaders to get something done instead of going through the paces of these periodic news cycles of mass shootings as though they're banal as quarterly finance reports.

Six days after the Christchurch massacre, the Prime Minister of New Zealand announced a ban on semiautomatic firearms. That legislation was passed last week. It has barely been a month since that terrorist attack. I struggle to process this.

Twenty years versus a month, and we wonder why other countries mock us when we claim to have the definitive answer to what "freedom" means.

Twenty years, and we're still waiting.

/thread