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On Visiting Columbine

It’s been a solid week since we moved into our little apartment in Littleton near the Denver light rail. And in that time I’ve passed by the Columbine High School about a dozen times. It wasn’t until yesterday that I got out and took some time to contemplate the memorial that is built just behind it.

What is most notable about it, isn’t so much the stories carved in stone of the students and teachers who were senselessly gunned down on that dark day in April ten years ago. It isn’t even the serene surroundings of mountains and grassy parks and playgrounds that cut such a drastic contrast to such dark violence.

The part that sticks with me is the clear and remarkable sentiments of the survivors whose quotes line the wall. Clear and remarkable in the sense that the core message isn’t pain so much as it is hope. Hope that people will remember the goodness of the people who died. Hope that people will take from the tragedy a heightened sense of value in the family and friends they may have before taken for granted. Hope that the enduring lesson, if one could even call it a lesson, is to be full of joy for a life that is indeed most precious…and most fragile.

Death is a part of life. We can in our minds state that fact and pretend we understand and are comfortable with it. Until death knocks squarely and unexpectedly on the door of our life and we are left asking, “why?”

I was living in Finland when these Columbine families lives were forever changed. At the time, I found myself in countless conversations with Finns who were convinced that such a thing would never, COULD never, happen in their land. On April 19, 1999 most Americans would have likely said the same thing about our nation.

It was only 8 years later that a student took up arms at Jokela High School in southern Finland and killed eight of his classmates. Germany saw school shootings in 2002 and again, just this year.

Clearly, it can happen. To anyone. Anywhere.

So instead of pretending we can skirt this kind of evil..and it is evil…I return to the walls of the Columbine memorial and am reminded that what sets humanity apart is not our capacity to do evil but our capacity for hope. In spite of the horrors that threaten us, we can find – if not reasons for evil – at least the ability take what is evil and turn it into something good.

Children play “cops and robbers” all the time…or some form of “good guy vs. bad guy” in what must be an effort to delineate these lines of right and wrong. In those games, the good guys always win. Like the cowboys in old westerns, the guy with the black hat always falls and the guy with the white hat rides off into the sunset with the pretty woman.

And while in real life the good guy may fall on the battlefield, whether it is found in war or in a school, it doesn’t mean that good doesn’t prevail. Good prevailed in Columbine. It continues to prevail as life has gone on and hope endures. Which all gives me the confidence to say that yes, the good guys do always win. Even if it’s hard to see it at the time.