Talking to My Four-Year-Old About School Shootings
How do we have the conversations that shouldn’t be necessary?
How well do you remember the 90s? Specifically, how well do you remember April 20, 1999?
I realize there are now people old enough to drink who didn’t even exist then. But personally, I was just a couple months shy of ten years old. Old enough to remember it, but not old enough to understand it. Certainly not old enough to emotionally prepare for the next 22 years and counting of similar tragedies.
April 20, 1999, for anyone too young to remember, was when the Columbine Massacre happened. A couple high school students murdered a dozen of their classmates plus a teacher. And it rocked the country.
My fifth grade teacher gave us an assignment a month or so later — near the end of the school year — to write a letter to the U.S. President. It was completely unrelated to the shooting. It was just a tie-in with our lessons about how the U.S. government works.
I think the teacher, bless her, expected us to write about how cool then-President Bill Clinton’s job was, or how we wanted to be President when we grew up, or maybe ask what it was like to be followed around by the Secret Service.
