A little over thirteen years ago, ten miles west of my home two attention seeking teenagers chose a Wednesday in April to turn Columbine High School into a shooting gallery.
Twelve students died, as did a heroic teacher. Two dozen more classmates were hurt. Added to the death count were both shooters, each of whom chose to commit suicide.
Colorado is a pretty compassionate place, a culture in which we mourn the loss of neighbors’ pets. The violence was so sudden and heinous it shattered Colorado’s innocence. Columbine was so far from the lives we live, we had nothing to compare it to; and because of that the community staggered for years.
Six months after Columbine, I was in Hawaii attempting to negotiate a big business deal with the Honolulu school district. I flew over from the mainland and stayed near Waikiki at the oceanfront Hilton Hawaiian Village. Dressed in my pressed slacks, polished shoes, and traditional aloha shirt, I was halfway out the door en route to a cab for an 8:30 AM business meeting two miles away when the room telephone rang.
I paused in the open doorway, pondering whether to go back and answer. If somebody’s calling, he or she must have a reason. I pivoted back inside and grabbed the receiver after the third ring.
The caller identified himself as a Honolulu police officer.
“Don’t come in,” he said. “Disburse.”
I asked why he was calling.
“Turn on the TV,” the officer clipped. “I have other calls to make.” click.
A breaking story blanketed the news: A co-worker had snapped, shooting and killing seven of nine at an eight o’clock team meeting. The killer shot at and missed an eighth, a man who hightailed it down the hall, dipping and dodging as he blessed himself and prayed he’d make the stairs.
The shooter was still on the loose. The police assumed he would next take aim on the executive team, of which I was considered a member.
At the time, as it remains today, the Xerox shootings were the worst crime in the history of Hawaiian statehood. With Columbine still in my life’s rear view mirror, I did not want or need another mass murder suddenly thrust upon me.
But I had no choice. Sometimes life gives you time to plan. Other times life makes you react. Scarred again and changed forever — again — eight weeks later I quit my job, which I had held for 20 years.
The company had changed and so had I. It was a big money job but I no longer cared. Life is bigger than dollars and cents. The decision for me was easy: I had to walk away.
More than a dozen years have passed since Columbine and Honolulu. As with all of life’s traumas, in the days that followed I adapted. Sunrises, sunsets, and changes of season are time’s escalators — they force us to move on. When these things are thrust upon you, you do not have the luxury of forgetting, all you can do is simply move on.
The past returned yesterday, disguised as the present when I awoke to the news that 12 more unarmed and innocent people were killed in a nearby movie theater. Fifty-nine others are injured, more than a dozen critically, courtesy of a trigger happy science student brave enough to dress head to toe in armor to shoot babies and children but far too cowardly to save one last bullet for his temple to finish the job.
Columbine is ten miles west. The Aurora Cinema is ten miles east. Here I am again, right square in the middle.
You do not get used to murders, you get numb to them. Time does not heal old wounds, time simply scars them over. I moved to Denver from Miami, deciding over a tuna melt at lunchtime the Friday before Christmas as I watched the owner of a diner spray blood away from his doorstep and down into the street. Five bullets that one took, a retribution hit in broad daylight.
The reason
In all three mass murders I have had thrust upon me, what itched the trigger finger of every assassin is identically the same: a craving for recognition.
Recognition comes to us in three different ways: We can earn it by design (through hard work, for example), achieve it by accident (good fortune, for example), or do it the easy way — by orchestrating an event, a spectacle, that feeds the voracious appetite of the electronic media.
The media, of course, lives by a simple rule: “It if bleeds, it leads.” Blood and guts are newsworthy. Kindness is not.
Following the Columbine and Xerox murders, I redirected my research to better understand behavior. I had to understand it better in order to do what I do now: teach life skills as an enabler to better business.
Whenever I see one of these lash-out atrocities I rue the obvious: the perpetrator(s) may or may not be book smart, but they most certainly are life stupid. They did not learn the subject they needed to learn the most — life skills.
Navigating each day in a positive way is easier to say than do. But helping each other do so is free, and it is well worth the effort. People need encouragement, they need to feel valued. Never miss a chance to do it.
Kindness is contagious. Pass it on.