I've been watching the local and national news ever since I was old enough to look at a screen. It's all part of a daily routine that, save school breaks and Sundays, has not been broken in years. Every morning, my brother and I would wake up a good hour and a half before school to my father's call. My family isn't talkative in the mornings, so my father would switch on the TV, and we'd all begin the day with a healthy dose of WSBTV'S Channel 2 Action News. Then, the clock would strike 7 a.m., and we'd spend the remainder of our pre-school morning watching ABC's Good Morning America.
The thing about watching that much news (besides being more well-informed than most of my elementary-aged and middle-school aged peers) is that one gets accustomed to hearing a plethora of local and national and international tragedies on a daily basis. Missing children on Monday, mystery murders on Tuesday, tragic car crashes on Wednesday, thieves on Thursday, corpses of the missing children found on Friday and so on. As I was born post-Columbine, I could depend on hearing of school shootings monthly or so with varying degrees of success.
While the widely repeated "no news is good news" isn't strictly true, it was perhaps 99 percent true for me, and over time, I've become desensitized to tragic events to an alarming degree.
When I first heard about the school shooting through one of Alpharetta Odyssey teammates, I couldn't even be bothered to look it up. 17 dead, she said. Tragic, I thought, before realizing that it had been a while since there was a successful school shooting. With how common they've become, it felt like we had one long overdue.
As my community peers expressed their shock at humanity's general decline, I had two epiphanies in subsequent order.
First, I noticed how people avoided liking my post like they were with everyone else’s because of how disturbing the concept of normalizing something as horrific as school shootings is. Second, I soon realized that my attitude isn't was nearly as disturbing as it was pragmatic.
It's horrible that I've learned to normalize the idea that some humans simply lack hearts. But once you get past the initial implication associated with the idea, you will realize how ignorant we are to continue to be shocked every time something slightly more tragic happens at this point in time. I’m writing this on February 14, 2018 — Valentine's Day. We are only one and a half months into 2018, and there have been 18 school shootings (of varying degrees of success) in the America.
It's about time we start learning to expect situations like this and prepare ourselves accordingly, like the way we do for other unexpected disasters, such as fires and tornado warnings. And while it can be truly difficult to implement a feasible school-wide system against the ingenuity of the determined heartless, we should replace the mentality "Oh, it's never going to happen to me," with "It might happen to me." (But in moderation. There's also something to be said about being so afraid of possibly dying that one simply fails to live.)
It's truly tragic that we have to resort to such a mentality. But then again, it would be much more tragic to actually die without ever having considered that dying is a very real possibility.
With that all said, however, do not start singling out people you may see as potential school shooters. That is an unsolicited assumption, and you seriously do not know that person as well as him/herself. Only that person can know if they are capable of shooting up a school. Second, pointing out certain people and alienating them based on assumptions might actually be the direct cause of the suspected person shooting up a school. Driving a person into a corner puts everyone in danger.
I truly applaud the people who continue to believe the best in people, despite events like this occurring. Those are the people who let their guards down and are open-minded, regardless. And though it may seem counter intuitive, it is actually people like these who are the best remedy to the prevention of school shootings. People with true friends (or at least people who have someone to reach out to, at the very least) are much less likely to become the perpetrators of such a catastrophic scenario with such a collateral ending.
Nevertheless, we should learn to expect catastrophes, while also keeping open minds and open hearts. I know. It's not easy. But for the sake of everyone, know that the effort is worth it.
