I don’t understand the hate.

           

            When I was in fourth grade, we had the coolest janitor. He was an enormous black dude named Jerry and everybody loved him. He was the kind of guy that had smile wrinkles around the corner of his eyes and kept candy in the supply closets to give to kids as we walked past him in the hallways. He was just that awesome.

            One day I sat in a group of fellow fourth graders, underneath the coat rack. I was tangling my arms in the sleeves of the dangling coats and pretending to listen as we read “Trolls, Tales, and Tommy-knockers,” aloud, when Jerry poked his head inside the classroom from the outside door and said in a most un-Jerry like and threatening tone, “Hey. Don’t open this door to anybody.” Then he locked the door with a resounding click, a click heavier and denser than Magnetite or iron.

            As fourth graders, we postulated what this might mean in whispers.

            “Maybe it’s a flood!”

            “But he said don’t open it to anybody.”

           

It was then that the early dismissals started. Students began to be called out of the classroom in droves until there were maybe three of us left by 3:15, each of us starting to suspect that maybe there was something our teachers weren’t telling us. Finally we goaded our teacher into giving us the news.

            “A bad man with a gun went into a local high school with a gun today. Only one person was shot, but he is going to be just fine.”

            It didn’t explain the early dismissals, but it put my juvenile mind at ease. I was able to walk home in relative peace, never mind my police escort to the bus and put Jerry’s concern wrinkles out of mind.

            When I got home, I encountered a rather grimmer reality:

            There were two bad gunmen. They were teenagers. It was suspected that the number of victims was in the 200 count, and there were 15 confirmed dead. They were teenagers too. It was 1999. It was my hometown. It was Columbine and in fourth grade, I didn’t understand the hate.

             In eleven years, I still haven’t forgotten the footage of people running from the building or falling, wounded, out of windows. I haven’t forgotten the mounds and piles of flowers and cards and candles that coated the walls of Clements Park. I haven’t forgotten Columbine. I think we all took a vow at those candlelit vigils that “we are all Columbine.”

            And even though I haven’t forgotten, today I remembered rather forcibly the memories that eleven years have not let me forget.

            A gunmen today came to my middle school. MY middle school. He opened fire on the students with his rifle, and, bless because of my seventh grade math teacher, he was tackled before he could inflict any fatal wounds. My middle school. My neighboring high school. My hometown.

            I wish everyone could remember Littleton, Colorado the way I do. Late night street hockey games with the neighbors, building tree forts in the valley, crisp summer nights, and youthful bliss. People instead associate my hometown with hatred and school shootings. I don’t understand.

            I am 21, and in all my years, I still don’t understand what could cause such hatred that could cause a 32-year-old man to open fire on a bunch of innocents. I don’t understand what kind of hatred could drive two teens to open fire on their fellow students. I don’t understand why we continue to hate and treat others with so much contempt that they feel compelled to kill.

            Just let them be seventh graders. Let them be innocent. Let us be fourth graders who don’t have to confront such a bleak outlook of humanity at such a young age. I will never understand.