#columbine was something that was way more personally impactful but we only learned about that through that kindness program we did

[theamazingannie]

This is apparently an extremely unpopular opinion, but I hate 9/11 jokes. And I don’t say this as some super patriotic person who is always like #neverforget and planning memorials and all that. I was born in 1999. I was two when it happened, so I don’t remember it. But I live in America so I’ve seen the documentaries and the news reports. It seems like every year of school starting in like 4th grade I learned something new about what happened that day. And it was a tragedy. It was devastating. People died. People felt so hopeless that they jumped out of buildings because it was better than burning to death. I agree that it’s unbearably annoying that we are so obsessed with this event. I agree that it is horrible that our country ignores the effects of this event, all of the innocent people who died in the war, all of the innocent Americans who were harassed and harmed afterwards for simply looking like the people who did this. I’m angry at our government for ignoring the signs of this attack because it wasn’t random. There were many things our government did that led to this attack and signs that something was coming. I don’t think it was an inside job, but I do think it could have been stopped. I don’t think Bush was involved simply because he didn’t freak out and panic in front of a bunch of children during story time (something everyone who claims Bush did 9/11 ignore when talking about his straight face after finding out). This wasn’t a military attack. These were innocent people just going to work. My dad knows someone who was inside the building because he was delivering sandwiches for a lunch order. I think a big part of the younger generations’ response to it is overexposure and a lack of personal understanding that leads to apathy. We see this frequently. I understand why you think it’s okay to make constant jokes about this. But it was still a tragedy, one that happened during some of our lifetimes. I don’t expect you to weep and be filled with patriotism and rage upon hearing about it. But I also don’t understand how anyone could joke about it. Especially not an entire generation

[racheljoyscott]

Armed with the knowledge of the events that transpired that day, I sometimes fantasize about saving Rachel and the others. I dream about time traveling back to '99 and planting myself as a Columbine student with a secret mission: thwarting the massacre from ever happening. Do you sometimes dream like that?

I think all of us in some way wish that. Whether its a dream, wishful thinking, a fantasy, whatever you want to call it. I think that's a natural instinct, a positive one. Wishing to help people is never a bad thing, despite being altruistic in nature.

Don't get too caught up in it, don't let it make you too sad. Columbine will go down in American history as one of the most tragic events. Everyone I ask remembers their reaction to Columbine, with heavy hearts. However, this is just my opinion, but I believe 9/11 shortly after dilutes the tragedy of the massacre. It was just such a tough time in our nations history. Tragedy after tragedy, so much change so quick. But Columbine really stopped our nation. Every household in America with a tv heard the story. It broke millions of hearts. Rachel's funeral was one of the most watched events on TV on the news at the time. Where I'm trying to get is, the only silver lining to the beautiful lives lost is that we heard their stories. Its a tough silver lining to draw, but that is the only true positive. We remember their names, their stories, we imagine their futures and we learned something from all of this. I got too caught up in the sadness of it all at one point. But I took myself out of it by appreciating life more and using it to help others.

Maybe instead of dreaming to go back in time to save them, change your perspective to trying to prevent and save people now. (Let me note, it's not your responsibility to save people!). The beauty of Rachel's story is that she proved that helping people, through the smallest of gestures, means more to people than you can truly conceptualize. Your actions hold so much power, that a little bit of kindness can prevent people from doing bad. You inspire, whether you realize it or not. And by being kind, and aiming to create a positive impact, you create a more meaningful life for yourself. The most unfortunate part of it too is it takes a tragedy to realize it, despite the truth being so simple. And to so many people, Rachel was the person that helped them realize that.

[missmentelle]

Just some small ways that the system keeps people down

When we think about social justice, we often think about it in terms of huge, sweeping reforms that happen on a national level: the nation-wide legalization of gay marriage. The end of segregation. Loving v Virginia. Roe v Wade. Many people only vote in federal elections and only keep up with federal politics, thinking that the federal government is what “really matters” when it comes to progress and human rights. 

Federal-level politics and landmark court rulings are important, but oppression often happens in much smaller, less obvious ways. It’s in the fine print of the eligibility criteria for disability benefits. It’s in municipal zoning laws. It’s in bank mortgage eligibility policies. It’s in the enforcement of public park bylaws. The things that make life difficult for marginalized communities often come from local bureaucracy, and look something like this: Disabled people effectively do not have the right to marry. 

In the United States, when a disabled person marries a non-disabled person, they gain a spouse, but they risk losing something immensely important - namely, all of their benefits. Currently, the government assumes that a non-disabled spouse takes full responsibility for all of their disabled spouse’s needs; it becomes their job to provide the disabled spouse with healthcare, housing, basic needs and assistive devices that they require, regardless of their ability to actually afford any of these things. Obviously, this is completely out of the question for most couples. Medical costs for a person with complex needs can be exorbitant, and the average person just cannot provide things like private home health services and out-of-pocket medical expenses for their spouse. 

Unless a disabled person is marrying someone who is independently wealthy, marriage is often out of the question. 

As a result, many disabled people simply have no meaningful access to marriage or the legal benefits and protections it provides. Without a wedding certificate, your partner cannot stay with you in the hospital, access your medical information or make decisions for you while you are incapacitated - something that people with complex medical issues may desperately need their partner to be able to do. International couples may have no means of being able to live in the same country. It may not even be possible for couples to live together at all, as the state may decide that that’s a “common-law” situation and strip away disability benefits even without a formal certificate. The people who are most in need of companionship and legal protection are denied access to it because of cruel and outdated laws that were designed with the false assumption that disabled people cannot desirable partners for non-disabled spouses. 

Domestic violence victims can be evicted for being abused. 

Some cities across America have implemented “nuisance laws” - these are laws originally designed to punish “slum landlords” who don’t try to stop criminal activity or loud parties in their buildings. In cities with nuisance laws, the city tracks how many 911 calls are made to (or about) each address in the city; if an address goes over their yearly limit of 911 calls, the city goes after the property’s landlord, fining them or even threatening them with criminal charges if they don’t make the calls stop. The point of the law is to encourage landlords to keep an eye on their tenants and evict “problem” tenants that disrupt the neighbourhood, and these policies have definitely resulted in a lot of 911-related evictions. And that’s a problem. Because you know who calls 911 a lot? Domestic violence victims. 

These laws have made it so that many people experiencing domestic violence have to choose between “help” and “housing”. If your partner is violently attacking you but your landlord has told you “one more 911 call and you’re out on the streets”, what do you do? How do you navigate such an impossible situation? Many victims simply hold off calling for help unless they’re reasonably certain that their partner is going to kill them, which is incredibly and almost indescribably dangerous, and still results in threats of eviction. Even victims who never call for help themselves can still find themselves out in the cold because of these policies - nuisance laws count any 911 calls made about an address, which means that a well-meaning neighbour calling the cops because they hear screams can cost you your housing. The end result is that an already-vulnerable population are either losing their housing or losing access to lifesaving emergency services, and everyone is worse for it. 

It’s worth noting that these policies also disproportionately affect disabled, elderly and chronically ill people. When you are medically fragile, you tend to have increased medical emergencies and a decreased ability to safely transport yourself to the hospital without an ambulance. So if 80-year-old diabetic woman uses her LifeAlert bracelet to call 911 three times in a year because she’s fallen down or having a hypoglycemic episode, she could face eviction for going over her 911 limit and being a “nuisance” to the city. 

Redlining has shut black people out of wealth-building for decades. How do you build wealth in America? You need credit. If you want to achieve real financial security, you need to convince someone to loan you large amounts of money at a low interest rate so you can use that money to purchase something that will build wealth for you. Let’s say you only have a little bit of money - you go to the bank and convince them to give you a mortgage (which is effectively just a large low-interest loan) so you can purchase a house for yourself. Once you’ve paid off the mortgage and showed the bank how reliable you are, you can go back and ask them for another loan against your house, and use that loan to buy a business, or a second house to rent out for income, or just save your money while your paid-off first house continues to increase in value. When you eventually die, your kids get all the property you amassed with those loans, and they start life in an even better financial position than you did - they can use that property to get even more credit and invest in even more businesses and property. This is how most American families clawed their way into the middle class after the Great Depression - your great-grandfather buying a house in the 1940s is the reason your parents could afford to pay for your college today. 

But there is one group that have been systemically left out of that process for decades, thanks to a practice called “redlining”. 

Banks decide whether or not they are going to loan you money by deciding how much of a “risk” you are. In the 1930s, bankers determined risk by looking at maps of their cities and drawing lines around particular neighbourhoods to determine how much of a risk they were. Bankers would draw red lines around predominantly-black neighbourhoods to signal that people who lived in those neighbourhoods were not eligible for credit - this was done regardless of their income. Poor white neighbourhoods could get loans, but middle-class black neighbourhoods could not. This meant that black people could not improve their situations - they could not afford to move out of cramped black neighbourhoods, they could not get the money to start a business, and they could not afford to renovate their houses to sell them at a profit. They were effectively shut out of opportunities that their white peers were granted. 

Redlining has been illegal for decades, but the cumulative impact of generations of redlining persist to this day. Experts estimate that an average black homeowner today has missed out on $212,023 in personal wealth because of the impacts of redlining.   “Zero-tolerance” policies have harmed marginalized and neurodivergent children without making schools safer. 

If you’ve attended or worked in a grade school in the last 20 years, you’re probably familiar with so-called “zero tolerance” policies. These policies emerged as a result of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, and are pretty much exactly what they sound like - in the wake of Columbine, schools began taking an extremely hardline stance against violence and bullying, assuring worried parents that they would not tolerate even the smallest hint of violence. In schools with zero-tolerance policies in place, punishments are extremely harsh - just about everything will get you suspended at a minimum. Get in a fistfight at school? Doesn’t even matter who started it, everyone involved is suspended. Throwing food? Suspended. Shouting at someone? Suspended. It doesn’t tend to matter if you were joking around or if you'd been pushed to the brink by a student who has bullied you for months - “zero tolerance” means absolutely zero tolerance, and you are suspended. 

But if you ever actually attended a zero-tolerance school, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that these policies don’t actually have any impact on school safety. What they do accomplish is higher rates of school failure and worse overall student outcomes, especially for marginalized students. 

And it makes sense. Which students are the most likely to be acting out in school? Students with ADHD, autism and learning disorders. Students with turbulent home lives. Students in foster care. Students dealing with abuse or trauma. These are the students who need to be in school the most, and need extra support from staff and teachers - instead of getting that support, though, zero-tolerance policies send them away from school for several days at a time, where they are unable to access support and fall further behind their peers. School quickly turns into a vicious cycle; students act out because they’re frustrated, they get suspended, they fall behind in class, which leads to more frustration, which leads to more acting out, which means more suspensions, which puts them further behind, etc, etc. Eventually they become so disillusioned that many of them leave school altogether, putting them at a permanent increased risk of unemployment, poverty, and incarceration.

Parking requirements are making cities unaffordable and unlivable for the poor.

Many cities - like Toronto and Vancouver - have mandatory minimum parking requirements written into their city zoning laws. These policies usually require that all residential buildings have at least one parking space available for every unit of residential housing - if you build a 60-unit apartment building, you need to make sure that you also buy enough land for a 60-stall parking lot or build a 60-space underground parking structure. 

When you think about the reasons that housing is unaffordable, “parking” might not be one of the first things you think of, but these laws have huge impacts on the cost of housing, and they negatively impact both the city itself and the working-class people who live there. Parking spaces are not free, especially in major cities like Toronto where land is at a premium - an above-ground parking space in a city costs an average of $24,000, while a below-ground space costs $34,000. Every unit of residential housing has $24-34k in parking costs tacked onto it - whether the tenant needs a parking space or not - and you can bet that landlords and developers are passing every penny of that cost onto their tenants. 

Parking requirements also decrease the number of units available, which is a problem, because the best way to keep housing affordable is to make sure that you have a lot of it available. A developer who might want to build a 300-unit apartment complex has to factor in the cost of creating at least 300 parking spaces.... so they might scale back to a 100-unit complex instead. Downtown areas that have huge demand for housing and low demand for residential parking are being underutilized because of zoning laws that were created decades ago and no longer reflect today’s reality. Young people, elderly people and urban poor people are increasingly unlikely to own a car, but they are being priced out of walkable neighbourhoods with good public transit for the sake of unwanted parking spaces.

Food safety laws and public property usage laws are making it illegal to feed the homeless. 

“Feeding the homeless” should be one of the most uncontroversial things you can do. Giving food to a person who is hungry is one of the most basic ways that humans care for one another. Everything from cheesy Hallmark movies to the Bible reinforces the importance of giving to others in need. But in dozens of cities across America, you can be fined, arrested or even jailed for giving out food to the homeless. 

Cities use different justifications to shut down or even arrest community service workers for trying to feed the homeless. Some pass increasingly restrictive “food safety laws”, stating that charities are only allowed to give away hot food, or that they are only allowed to give away sealed and individually-packed meals, or that they are only allowed to feed homeless people indoors (something that community organizations like mine do not always have the resources to do). Restrictions continue to get tighter every year in some places, despite the fact that there are virtually zero recorded cases of a homeless person being harmed by food they received from a registered charity. Food safety laws can also force restaurants and stores to destroy their unsold food instead of passing it out; some have to go as far as pouring bleach over the food they throw out in their dumpsters. 

Other cities have used public property bylaws to ban food-sharing on public property, forcing charities to apply for permits to hand out food (which are rarely granted). Justifications for these bylaws vary - some cities give vague excuses about “safety” while others admit that they’re trying to drive homeless people out of their cities - but the end result is the same. Cities are so desperate to be rid of their homeless populations that they’ll criminalize trying to help the homeless, rather than offering stable, affordable housing solutions. 

[theaspiringwanderess]

Maligne Pass Trail

(my amazing sister)

The Maligne Pass Trail is a well known, now partially decommissioned trail, located in the world renowned Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. It is a highly sought after hike, known for its alpine meadows full of amazing wild flowers and spectacular scenery. In 2018 I had the privilege experiencing this amazing and historic trail not only with my sister, but also an impressive group of female backpackers. In total we spent a full 3 day weekend hiking; one day hiking the Potokan Creek Trail to Avalanche Campground where we setup camp, a second day of day-hiking further up the pass, and day 3 hiking back to civilization. 

A Little History Blurb 

There is a significant story nestled in Canadian history about a woman explorer named Mary Schaffer that makes the Maligne Pass Trail just a little bit more magical. You may have never heard of her but, you could almost say little Miss Mary could be credited in large part for the later development of Jasper National Park, literally a Canadian jewel. In Pennsylvania, 1861, then Mary Townsend Sharples was born into a time when it was considered improper for woman to be on expeditions, much less leading them. In 1889, shortly after being introduced to her then future husband, Dr. Charles Schaffer, the two married and began the first of many trips together through the Canadian Rockies. They collaborated on a labour of love, a joint book of regional wildflowers, aptly named ‘Alpine Flora of the Canadian Rockies’ which would eventually be published in 1907 (a historic version can be found online via open Chung Collection of UBC). After Charles’ passing in 1903, Mary set about to complete the guide book in his honour. In her endeavour to do so, she forged relationships, and friendships, with local Nakota tribesman whom assisted in guiding and helping her through her travels, most notably Sampson Beaver and his family. As a result of these expeditions, Mary is considered equally as famous for the “discovery” of Maligne Lake and for being (likely) the first Caucasian person, albiet female none the less, to chart a path to it, as she is for the completion of the botanical guidebook. Her additional, and possibly most famous publication, Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies, recounts her expeditions between 1907-1908 and is credited not only as leading to the protection of the Maligne Lake area, but as being a key, first hand account of social standards of the era. In 1911, a 49 year old Mary was approached by the Geographical Survey of Canada to survey and document the lake area and in doing so name the lake, mountains, peaks and other geographical features for her guides, family, friends and sponsors. You can read more about these details, and Mary, including some fascinating quotes and other points of interest here.  

About the Trail

Our party of 10 tenacious women parked in a parking lot located on the western side of the bridge over the Poboktan creek. We suited up, grabbed our packs and walked over the bridge to the Poboktan Creek Trail Head and began our adventure. The trail primarily tracks alongside the Poboktan until you reach its confluence with Poligne Creek where you will shift direction to head northwesterly along Poligne until you reach Avalanche Campground. Although only an approximate 11 km to our destination at Avalanche, the elevation climbed from about 1540 meters at the trailhead to approximately 2037 meters at the campground itself; it is important to note that the elevation continues to climb as you continue further down the trail past the campsite. The best advice is pack light, the terrain was very firm, I was thankful I had bought some good quality, hiking grade insoles for my Lowa’s, but my feet still came away pretty sore. It took us most of the day at a steady pace (roughly 6 or so hours, not rushing and accounting for brief breaks and lunch riverside) to reach Avalanche. Both black flies and mosquitos are plentiful residents here, so be sure to pack, and liberally apply, a broad spectrum insect repellent (unless maybe you like bitey friends!). 

The creeks provide clean and plentiful water sources all the way to Avalanche, though water tabs are always recommended. In total we passed few other hikers along the way, most closest to the trailhead, including a young couple with a new baby (brave, admirable... Park lifestyle, who knows!); but for the most part, as we ventured into more remote areas, we were on our own and very secluded, passing only two or three other parties the remainder of the weekend. The trail was fairly clear and easy to see, though some of the bridges were not in good shape. Although we were still able to cross at the expected spots, being a partially decommissioned hiking trail means the Park is no longer doing formal maintenance on the trail; bridges may not be upkept or repaired and fallen debris may not be cleared, so be prepared, if necessary, to find safer routes if required. A special reservation must also be made through Parks Canada to stay at the Avalanche Campsite. Only single party reservations for specific time frames will be allowed at a time with a limited number allowed each year. 

(map courtesy Parks Canada)

Wildlife and Plantlife

Oddly enough we actually did not encounter much wildlife on our trek. If you’re like me, wildlife and photography are a huge part of what I enjoy about hiking, so this was a bit unfortunate. I believe this may have had to do most likely with our party size. However the area is very well known for elk, moose, bears (both black and grizzly), cougars, pikas (at higher elevations), ground squirrels and many other amazing creatures. We also spotted some amazing wildflowers including wild columbine, willow, lilies, and much, much more! Even with the lack of animal appearances, trust me, there is no shortage of stunning scenery and photographic opportunities - beauty is literally everywhere.

However, I think its worth mentioning, even if you don’t come across much in the realm of animals, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still around. It is important to ALWAYS remember and exercise bear safety. Ensure you have the proper equipment, this includes bear bells and other noise makers to alert wildlife to your presence, and keeping readily accessible bear spray. Travelling in groups is always recommended, there is safety in numbers and no cell service for emergencies. Do not leave your garbage on the trail and do not bring food or scented items into your tent, this can attract animals of all kinds, including bears, that you may not appreciate sharing your supplies with, or cuddling next to, at night. One of the ladies in our party shared a tale of the time they left their bike helmets outside to dry overnight, only to awaken the next morning to find raccoons eating the salt soaked foam padding (I couldn’t help but imagine it must not have been a comfy wear after that - lol) ... mice, skunks and racoons are also common campground scavengers and have been known to get into even the best hung bear bags. 

(small animal tracks)

Why Decommission Trails? 

This is something I was curious about when I read up on the Maligne Pass Trail. Why suddenly decommission a popular trail with so much history? In short its because of its popularity and the rare and unique wildlife and fauna put at risk by the people traversing through. I learned that it takes years (6+) for the tundra to recoup from a single misplaced step! Obviously this area is special, and because of this Jasper National Park has decided now to make it accessible only to the most well versed and savvy backpackers in hopes that it will remain protected and safe for years to come. This means removing it from common maps and advertising it significantly less. Please be cognoscente of the purpose behind this as you pass through and remember to keep your impact on the area to a minimum. Pack your garbage back with you, burn fires only in provided pits, do not feed or approach the wildlife, and... beware of where you step ;) . 

Avalanche Campsite 

Avalanche Campsite was beyond amazing... I was so saddened to realize I didn’t actually get a good shot of it, so this magical photo of the path into it will just have to do (sorry!). Perched atop a hillside overlooking a bend in the creek, this amazing spot snuck right up on us. There were about 4-5 tent-ready pads. A couple picnic tables and 2 fire pits. There were 2 bear bag hanging areas further to the left of the site (as you face the tent pads) with stainless steel cord and fixing carabineers. There was also a surprisingly nice toilet facility located above and slightly to the right of the tent pads, well concealed in the forest. One of the articles I read prior to the hike describe the facilities as ‘having the best skylight you’d ever seen...” took us a bit to clue in, but rest assured the view is definitely boundless (lol). There was also a pretty sturdy fallen tree across the river that one of the braver ladies turned into an impromptu yoga study... just be sure if you give it a try that your balance is spot on because the water is brisk!

Beyond Avalanche 

After setting up camp, having a hearty meal and crashing for the night, day two was a welcome adventure into the great beyond of The Pass. Ensure you have ample water setting out on your trek as further along the trail you stray away from the creek supply. You will eventually come across some fresh springs and small pothole lakes as you enter the higher altitude, valley-like area just above the tree line. The path leaving the campsite was a bit tricker to find for the first while and winds through some scrub brush and light coniferous forest. Eventually we made our way past this and the path opens up into a small valley-like plain, congratulations, you have set eyes on something few will now see, The Maligne Pass! With peaks on either side and a well trodden, dirt path which passes by a chain of tiny little lakes (almost more the size of large ponds) the wild flowers are stunning and the view is breathtaking. Here you will be treated to an array of various colours of Indian Paint Brush, willows, Alpine Heather, Alpine Aster, Western Pasqueflower, numerous awe inspiring fungi, and I was told by a biologist in our group, a very rare beauty she was literally mind blown to find, known as Teal Gentian, amongst much, much more. 

 We passed much of the day away climbing the nearby mountain peaks, making snow angels and looking down on the stunning view of Maligne Lake which was visible in the distance. We even enjoyed a brief dip in the tiny lake, brief being the operative word since it was also freezing! Having throughly explored The Pass, as the day came to a close we turned around and headed back to base camp. On our way back we came across a young solo German hiker making his way through the valley and continuing along the pass trail. This was worth a mention as we briefly spoke with him and he inquired about safe places (or rather the lack there of at this point) to make a camp and bear proof your supplies. What trees there were, were spindly and not high enough to adequately hang or keep safe a food bag. If you intend on continuing through the trail do keep this in mind as you will need to have enough time to make adequate arrangements to keep you and your supplies safe for the night.

Noteworthy Points

The majority of the women in my party had camel backs (If you’re not familiar, these are large refillable water bottles able to be stored inside your pack). I used two large Nalgine water bottles which were very sufficient but not as easy to access on the fly. After returning I did some research and invested in a Platypus collapsable hydration pack; it just seems so much easier on the move and these babies weigh literally nothing empty (which is a major objective for me!).

Pack sunscreen and be prepared to reapply it mid-day. Although I’d applied ample sunscreen, I found out the hard way that skin burns faster at higher altitudes due to the thinner atmosphere. I was teased by friends the rest of the summer for my awesome half-tanned legs (courtesy of my gaiters).

If you plan on making a base camp as we did at Avalanche and doing some day hiking, consider packing a lightweight, compact daypack or camelback pack.  

While the days were hot (+25/27 celsius), the nights were much colder than I expected. I have a Marmot Womens’ Trestles mummy bag (which I ADORE! it just wish I’d brought the warmer one!) rated for +5 celsius and a charcoal bag liner, and even with layers on (tee shirt, sweat pants, socks, merino wool sweater and leggings) I was STILL cold (much to my surprise and dismay). The mountains can be deceiving, pack warm and consider the temperatures drops significantly at night.

Final Thoughts

I consider this as one of my most favourite hiking experiences to date and I only wish we could’ve spent a bit more time and extended our stay to explore the full trail. The scenery was spectacular and was only made better by the great company. 

You can find more of my photography from the Maligne Pass Trail and more on my website at KatrynaJones.com 

[kansascityhappenings]

Mass shootings transform how America talks, prays, prepares

CHICAGO — Pardeep Singh Kaleka has surveyed the landscape of an America scarred by mass shootings.

Seven years ago, a white supremacist invaded a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and killed six worshippers — among them Kaleka’s father, who died clutching a butter knife he’d grabbed in a desperate attempt to stop the shooter. Now, whenever another gunman bloodies another town, Kaleka posts a supportive message on social media. Then later, either by invitation or on his own initiative, he’ll journey to the community to shore up others who share his pain.

He’s been to Newtown, Connecticut. Charleston, South Carolina. Pittsburgh. “We’ve become kind of a family,” Kaleka says.

It’s true. The unending litany of mass shootings in recent years — the latest, on Friday, leaving 12 dead in Virginia Beach, Virginia — has built an unacknowledged community of heartbreak, touching and warping the lives of untold thousands.

All the survivors, none of them unscathed. The loved ones of the living and dead. Their neighbors, relatives and colleagues. The first responders, the health care workers, the elected officials.

The attacks have changed how America talks, prays and prepares for trouble. Today, the phrases “active shooter” and “shelter in place” need no explanation. A house of worship will have a priest, a rabbi or an imam — and maybe, an armed guard. And more schools are holding “lockdown drills” to prepare students for the possibility of a shooter.

Post-traumatic stress disorder was once largely associated with combat-weary veterans; now some police and firefighters tormented by the memories of the carnage they’ve witnessed are seeking professional help. Healing centers have opened to offer survivors therapy and a place to gather. Support groups of survivors of mass shootings have formed.

Mayors, doctors, police and other leaders who’ve endured these crises are paying it forward — offering comfort, mentoring and guidance to the next town that has to wrestle with the nightmare.

Former Oak Creek Mayor Stephen Scaffidi, who’d been on the job just four months at the time of the 2012 Sikh temple attack, remembers a call that night from the mayor of Aurora, Colorado, where 12 people had been fatally shot at a movie theater less than three weeks earlier. “He gave me the best advice I could ever receive in that moment: ‘Be calm. Reassure your community. And only speak to what you know. Don’t speculate, don’t pretend to be an expert on something that you’re not,’” Scaffidi recalls.

Last year, two days after the fatal shooting of 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Christine Hunschofsky, mayor of Parkland, Florida, met the mother of a 6-year-old killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School who offered a road map into the future.

“She forewarned me of many of the things that we would encounter,” Hunschofsky recalls. “She said at first it will seem like everyone comes together. Then it seems like a tsunami that hits the community. People become very divided. This is all normal after a mass trauma.”

Three months later, it was Hunschofsky’s turn. She sent a message to the incoming mayor of Santa Fe, Texas, where a school shooting left 10 dead. “She told me this is not going to be the hardest day and harder days are coming,” recalls Mayor Jason Tabor. “‘Prepare for that.’ She was 100 percent right.”

The two mayors have since become fast friends and Hunschofsky visited Santa Fe. “We’re bonded for life,” Tabor says.

Mass shootings account for a tiny percentage of homicides, but their scale sets them apart. In 1999, the Columbine shooting shocked the nation with its unforgettable images of teens running from the school with their hands up — scenes repeated in other similar attacks years later. Today, the public sees and hears about these events as they unfold, through live-streamed video or tweets.

Each tragedy is horrifying, but the sense of it-can’t-happen-here has worn off.

“We’re a desensitized society,” says Jaclyn Schildkraut, a criminologist at the State University of New York at Oswego.

“There is an element of mass shooting fatigue where we’ve gone from ONE MORE,” she says, her voice rising with exasperation, “to add another one to the list. Everybody immediately goes for the gun argument … and maybe throw a little mental health in there, but we really don’t have a consistent, prolonged conversation about these events and how to prevent them.”

Studies have offered some hints of their emotional wallop. The National Center for PTSD estimates 28 percent of people who have witnessed a mass shooting develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and about a third develop acute stress disorder.

Laura Wilson, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia conducted a meta-analysis — an examination of data from 11 studies of PTSD symptoms among more than 8,000 participants who ranged from those who’d witnessed shootings to those who just lived in the communities in a 20-year period. She found the greater the exposure — someone who was at the scene or who lost a friend or family — the greatest risk of developing PTSD. But, in her work, Wilson has found other factors, too, including previous psychological symptoms and a lack of social support, also played a role in increasing the likelihood.

“Mass shootings are a different type of trauma,” Wilson says. “People are confronted with the idea that bad things can happen to good people. … Most people have a hard time reconciling the idea that a young, innocent person made the good decision to go to school, was sitting there, learning and was murdered. That does not make sense to us. … It just rattles us to our core.”

And yet, some people don’t fully appreciate the lasting psychological wounds of those who escaped physical harm.

A study conducted by a University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor after the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting that left 58 people dead found PTSD levels for those at the concert remained elevated at least a year later. Most of these people had a friend, family member or co-worker asking — as early as 1½ months after the event — why they were still troubled.

“Almost everyone had someone say, ‘Get over it. Why are you letting this bother you?’” says Stephen Benning, a psychology professor who conducted the research. Those kinds of remarks were associated with increased levels of PTSD, which lasted longer than depression.

April Foreman, a psychologist and board member of the American Association of Suicidology, likens exposure to mass shootings to a flu epidemic that affects the entire community in different ways.

“When we have these mass casualty events it’s like an outbreak of a virus,” she says. “Some people might be immune or not susceptible to that strain. Some people are going to get a little sick, some people are going to be very sick. Some people might have compromised immune systems and if they’re exposed they have a very high risk for life-threatening illness. Suicide is like the extreme outcome.”

In one week in March, two student survivors of the Parkland school shooting killed themselves. Around the same time, the father of a 6-year-old killed girl in Newtown died of an apparent suicide. He had created a foundation in his daughter’s name to support research on violence prevention.

Austin Eubanks, a Columbine student who was shot and watched his best friend die in the school massacre, died last month, possibly of an overdose. He struggled with opioid use after the attack and later became an addiction recovery speaker. A memorial fund established in his name is seeking funds for a trauma-informed program for families and victims of mass violence.

After the Parkland suicides, Hunschofsky says, many people sought mental health help for the first time. “They just told me, ‘I thought I was OK, but after this happened, maybe I’m not. Maybe I do need to talk to someone.’” The community’s wellness center, established after the Parkland shooting, extended its hours.

A similar program, the Resiliency Center of Newtown, is an informal gathering place for those grappling with anxiety, depression and PTSD. Though the school attack occurred 6½ years ago, the center still gets new clients and after every mass shooting, more people stop by.

“Your heart hurts every time a new tragedy happens because you know what those people who are impacted are going to have to go through and what the community is going to go through, and that’s hard,” says Stephanie Cinque, the center’s founder and executive director. “You don’t just get over it and move on.”

In Florida, Orange County Sheriff John Mina, Orlando’s police chief during the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub, realized that when he reached out to law enforcement peers — former chiefs of Aurora and Newtown — afterward. “‘What do you think I should be doing six months, a year from now?” he asked. “They said, ‘John, you’re not going to be dealing with this a year. You’re going to be dealing with this five or 10 years. That was like a punch in the gut.”

There were some immediate lessons learned, he says. Among them: improved communications with the fire department and better equipment. After the Pulse shooting, officers were given Kevlar helmets and an extra layer of body armor that will stop rifle rounds.

Mental health debriefings were held six months and a year after the shooting rampage for Orlando officers who went to the nightclub that morning.

Some have reached beyond the department to UCF RESTORES, a clinic at the University of Central Florida that helps trauma victims. It was originally designed to serve the military, but has expanded to include first responders and sexual assault victims, among others.

Deborah Beidel, the clinic’s director, says first responders called to mass shootings face trauma similar to those in combat. About 50 firefighters, police and paramedics who were at Parkland and Pulse have been treated, most in a three-week outpatient program that exposes them to the sounds, smells and sights they encountered that caused their PTSD.

For those inside the Pulse, Beidel says, “the sound of cellphones ringing and ringing and ringing and no one answering them became a trigger for many people. Afterward, any time they heard a cellphone, particularly that Marimba ring on the iPhone, they would have a flashback.”

Beidel says the goal isn’t to make workers forget but to “put that memory in a file where it no longer affects every other aspect of their life, so that they no longer are restricted in what they can do because … of flashbacks or panic or whatever they might be experiencing.”

Jimmy Reyes, a 35-year-old Orlando firefighter, enrolled in the program about five months after Pulse. He’d been haunted by the memory of tending to more than two dozen bloody, wounded people carried from the club, sprawled over a parking lot, screaming in agony.

After more than four stressful hours caring for the wounded, not knowing who’d live or die, he returned home. As he and his wife watched the TV news, he began sobbing. She held him. “We did the best that we could,” he told her.

Less than a week later, Reyes had a panic attack while working a second job — he was on a safety team in a jet ski race. “I couldn’t breathe,” he says. “I kept telling myself, ‘You’ll be fine. It’ll pass.’” It didn’t. He dreaded another big call at work.

Firefighters, he says, “kind of bury a lot of stuff. It gets put in a file in the back of your head. That’s what I thought this was going to be.”

But it didn’t stay there. He was short-tempered with his family. He had little interest in doing anything but sitting at home. Finally, Reyes decided to seek help.

For three weeks, he relived his experiences, answering questions from a therapist as he told his Pulse story over and over, recalling everything he saw, including one man talking on his cellphone who’d been shot in the head and another critically wounded who asked, “Am I going to die?” At certain points, the therapist would cue up sounds he’d heard — gunshots from inside the club, the wail of the sirens, an explosion.

At first, he says, he cried. By the end of the sessions, he was dry-eyed and calm.

Reyes is better now and remains a firefighter. He never considered quitting. But he’s changed.

“I felt like I was normal before Pulse,” he says. “I was a very happy guy, no problems, no issues with mental health. Now I still deal with depression. I still deal with anxiety. … I look back at those days. … June 11th, I was normal. Then June 12th happened. I’m a completely different person.”

So is Las Vegas trauma surgeon Dave MacIntyre.

He talks in a rapid-fire, breathless way about the chaos 19 months after the Route 91 shooting. More than 90 severely injured patients in 113 minutes. He repeats that phrase as if it still hasn’t completely sunk in. After 20 years, he’s now a part-time trauma surgeon looking to get out of the operating room completely. MacIntyre enrolled in January in an executive MBA program for doctors, with plans on becoming a consultant for helping hospitals deal with similar challenges. He’s trying meditation, too.

MacIntyre didn’t realize he had PTSD until an MBA program coach picked up on his symptoms — anxiety, stress, short temper, avoidance. His marriage has suffered. His work, too. “I find it very hard to talk to family members and give them bad news … much more so than before,” he says.

After the shootings, his hospital brought in therapy dogs and counselors for the staff but not everyone participated. “As physicians we’re not going to want to show weakness. We’re not going to want to go into an auditorium full of people or get on the floor and pet dogs,” he says. “A lot of physicians internalize. You get to the point where it’s unbearable.”

It was different for Brian Murphy. He says he didn’t have any psychological trauma after the shootings at the Sikh temple.

Murphy, the first officer on the scene, was shot 15 times. His face, hands, arms and legs were riddled with bullets. One bullet remains lodged in his skull; another in his throat after slicing one vocal card and paralyzing the other, leaving him with a permanent rasp.

Medically retired from the Oak Creek police department, Murphy completed the master’s degree in criminal justice administration he’d started before he was injured.

He now works for the company that makes the bulletproof vest that stopped three rounds that struck him that August day. He counsels other wounded officers, talking about something deep in his DNA — resiliency.

Murphy gets injections in his throat every three months to stop scar tissue from tightening and has some trouble swallowing, but he has no complaints, noting he was first told he’d never talk or eat on his own. “Once I knew I wasn’t going to die, everything else was butter,” he says.

He credits his family’s support for rebounding. And he refuses to let the shooting dominate his thoughts.

“It’s not like I wake up and say, ‘I can’t believe this happened.’ It’s just life now. I don’t think there’s a tremendous amount of good that comes from looking behind.”

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/06/02/mass-shootings-transform-how-america-talks-prays-prepares/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/06/03/mass-shootings-transform-how-america-talks-prays-prepares/

[gyrlversion]

20 years after Columbine, former Principal Frank DeAngelis is still learning how to move on

There are letters from President Bill Clinton, another from President Barack Obama and one from Vice President Joe Biden. There’s a photograph of Frank with Clinton, another of him with Hillary Clinton, and one of him beside Celine Dion.

The torch holder he carried for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City is mounted near a matching newspaper clipping. And there’s an autographed photo of baseball great Derek Jeter, wishing Frank well in the run-up to his retirement in 2014 as the principal of Columbine High School.

“It’s a little bit of history,” Frank said.

At first, he was bound by a promise to stay at the helm until every student who’d been at the school that unimaginable morning had graduated. Then, he expanded that vow, remaining until every local child who’d been in class that day, down to preschoolers, had earned a diploma.

Since stepping away from the principal’s office, he has continued his commitment to collective recovery — and expanded his flock far beyond Columbine High School.

Five years after retiring, the 64-year-old is as busy as ever, traveling the country to shepherd principals and communities that have fallen victim to the scourge of school shootings. It’s the latest iteration of an evolving role, however unwelcome, he has pioneered since April 20, 1999.

“Columbine offers hope,” Frank told CNN. “And that’s what I hope, 20 years later, that we’re doing, that we’re reaching out to other people — the Parklands, the Santa Fes, the Sandy Hooks, the Virginia Techs.”

“I feel I was chosen to do that.”

But he’s also given so much of himself to Columbine, several people close to him said. And with the 20th anniversary of the shooting and the publication of a new memoir, “They Call Me ‘Mr. De,'” Frank’s wife, Diane DeAngelis, hopes he soon considers slowing down.

“It always comes to a head right before the anniversary,” she said. “And I just hope that with the 20th, that maybe this is the last anniversary that is as big as it is and that we can move on a bit.”

A devoted educator faces the unthinkable

When Frank was 13, he got a job in a pizzeria. In high school, he delivered newspapers. Frank’s parents taught hard work and dedication, and when he got sick, he hardly ever missed work.

Diane, who dated Frank in high school, said he was nice but very serious. He didn’t have a sense of humor. The couple spent all their time together, and while still in high school, Frank gave her a promise ring and said he wanted to get married. Diane didn’t want that, she said, so they broke up.

“I had no spontaneity … I was so serious,” Frank admitted. “I was 15 or 16 going on 30, and I had to plan my whole life out.”

Even so, Frank was unsure what he wanted to study in college, his brother said. But they had both played sports growing up, so when Frank told his brother he’d become an educator, Anthony DeAngelis assumed it was for the sake of athletics.

“I thought, ‘He’s probably going to be pretty good at this,'” Anthony said.

As with all things, Frank dove in deep. Early in his career, Frank’s principal once forced him to fork over his keys to the school for a weekend. “He said, ‘I do not want to see you around this school. Frank, you need to get away,'” he remembered.

Frank displayed that same commitment to each of his students and the baseball players he coached, said Tom Tonelli, one of Frank’s former pupils and a Columbine High School graduate who went on to teach at the school.

“It was always: Be a good student, be a good athlete, but above all else, be a good person,” said Tonelli of Frank’s expectations.

Still today, when Frank’s brother hands over his credit card at restaurants, servers often ask if he’s related to Frank, Anthony said. A waitress last year told him Frank had been her principal.

“And she goes, ‘You could talk to any of my friends. What we appreciated was how he treated us,'” Anthony recalled.

That sentiment holds whether before or after the shooting, said Tonelli, who was on staff at Columbine the day gunfire erupted.

“Do I think the shooting transformed him? Absolutely,” the teacher said. “But to say somehow he became a totally different type of person, I don’t think so. The character he exhibited in the wake of the tragedy is just a reflection of who he was before it happened.”

When ‘the world didn’t believe in us,’ he did

Columbine High School serves a middle- and upper-middle-class community in Littleton, Colorado, where the mountains in the west rise into a wide open sky. Before the massacre, it was an “ideal” community, Frank said, with a lot of parental support and where he “could count on my two hands the number of fistfights we had in 20 years.”

After the shooting, Frank “felt this enormous burden to go rebuild that community,” he said. That’s when he made the promise to stay at Columbine until the Class of 2002 had graduated. Other staff members made the same commitment, he said.

But in 2001, Frank felt he hadn’t accomplished what he’d set out to do.

“There were so many people deeply impacted, even the kids in elementary school,” he said. “So, I made a promise that I wanted to be there until that last class graduated, which would be 2012.”

Two years after that, he finally left.

Frank’s promise to stay gave him “so much credibility in the community,” Tonelli said. The faculty and staff, along with the students and the whole community, looked to him as a leader, as someone who was “persevering for a cause greater than himself.”

The perception stuck, even in the face of criticism that the school’s administrators and faculty had fostered a student culture “where something like this could happen,” Tonelli said, referring to the shooting and calling the claim “unjust.”

The notion “that there were certain segments of the population we didn’t care about was so untrue,” the teacher said.

Through it all, Frank’s “leadership meant everything,” he said. “He was the biggest believer in our kids and in their teachers and in our community at a time when we felt like the rest of the world didn’t believe in us anymore.”

A leader battles darkness at home

But as he worked to help Columbine recover, Frank was also an ordinary survivor. At home, his heroic veneer vanished, giving way to the reality of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I tried to do everything to protect what I call the Columbine family,” Frank recalled. “But when I would come home, I just wanted to be left alone.”

He didn’t want to talk with his first wife and two stepchildren about what happened; they just didn’t understand the aftermath, he said.

“It cost me my marriage,” he said. “My wife was saying, ‘You’re not the same person I married. You’ve changed.’ And I did. I felt so much guilt.”

His trauma manifested in other ways, too. Months after the shooting, Frank and his brother went to a Colorado Rockies game. When fireworks lit up the sky, Anthony said, “My brother nearly took cover.” Later, Frank told Anthony the celebratory display took him right back to the attack.

More shell shock set in when Frank returned to Columbine the summer after the shooting to prepare for the new academic year. Bangs and rumbles echoed as construction crews repaired damage to the building.

“I would have to go back to my office,” he said, “and I would cry.”

Hope thrives in ‘tough love’

Ahead of the massacre’s third anniversary, as he was pushed by divorce proceedings to the edge of emotional and financial “ruin,” Frank began pecking away at the mountain of unopened letters he’d gotten in its wake. Among the first he picked up was from his high school sweetheart, Diane.

They began talking regularly by phone, often late into the night, but agreed not to see each other until Frank’s marriage was dissolved.

“There was still a spark,” Diane said, and she could tell Frank had grown up. “I could see that he had a sense of humor,” she laughed, but also that his core traits hadn’t changed. “Some of the good things that brought us together were there from the beginning.”

But as their relationship developed, Frank continued to wrestle with his trauma. As with many Columbine survivors, it always got harder in the advent of April, a month in which Frank has gotten into six car wrecks and when his attention always jerks back to the terror.

He leaned on counseling and his Catholic faith, but he was living alone in a nearly vacant house, with only a few pictures and a single bed left after most everything else was sold off.

“Twenty years of my life was in shambles,” he said. “I was struggling,” and he eventually started to drink.

Diane, whose father was a recovered alcoholic, quickly caught on. Frank started hanging up the phone around 4 in the afternoon, she said, and telling her they would talk the next day.

“Immediately, I knew,” she said. “I thought, I don’t know if I’m going to have to end this, because I can’t go down that path again.”

Diane’s father died that April; Frank attended the visitation, and they began seeing each other. Soon, Diane caught him drinking. “I can’t do this,” she told him.

“It was justifiable,” Frank said, looking back. “That was what I needed, that tough love … I was so fortunate she came back into my life. And I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that. It was a wake-up call.”

Leading the ‘Club Nobody Wanted to Join’

When he talks to others who have lived through school shootings, Frank mentions the risk of using alcohol or drugs to cope, and he emphasizes the importance of finding positive sources of support.

It’s just one of many pieces of advice he gives to members of what he calls in his book, “A Club Nobody Wanted to Join.”

Columbine wasn’t the first school shooting, and it obviously wasn’t the last. But every time another mass murder happens at a school, Frank said, his phone begins to ring with calls from reporters seeking insight from one of the nation’s most seasoned campus attack veterans.

“Not that I’m an expert,” he said, “but I lived through it.”

He was called on as recently as this week to address the news media when a Florida teenager — who authorities said was “infatuated” with the Columbine massacre — traveled to Colorado and bought a shotgun, prompting the shutdown of Denver-area schools, including Columbine.

Frank also reaches out to school leaders thrust into the role he knows so well. Last year, he said he connected after deadly shootings with administrators at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as well as Santa Fe High School in Texas and Marshall County High School in Kentucky.

Getting that call carries a lot of weight, said Andy Fetchik, the former principal of Chardon High School in Ohio, where three students were killed in a shooting in February 2012.

The first thing Frank said was, “We are now members of the same fraternity that neither one of us pledged,” Fetchik told CNN. “And the second thing he asked me to do was to write down his cell phone number.”

Months later, as Fetchik prepared to start the next school year, he gave Frank a call, he said.

“There was a peace of mind in speaking with someone that went through it,” Fetchik said, noting that Frank validated the steps he’d taken to help his Ohio school community heal.

Several years later, Frank visited Chardon High School to talk with faculty members about the recovery process.

“One of the things I struggled with in the recovery was addressing the needs of staff. We didn’t always know what they needed,” Fetchik said. “Frank was that voice of somebody who’s been there, who said, ‘Where you’re at is OK. Mental health recovery is not something you could control. There’s no calendar.'”

‘Columbine is not going to define me’

Today, Frank and Fetchik are members of the Principal Recovery Network, a new group of 17 current and former school administrators who have lived through school shootings and their aftermath. Unlike activists who have sought to change gun laws following campus attacks, these officials simply aim to offer themselves and their combined experience as a resource.

It falls in line with the work Frank has undertaken since he retired. Last year, he gave about 50 presentations in the United States and Canada about the recovery process. He also serves on the boards of school safety and other organizations, he said, knowing his name and connection to Columbine carry weight.

But he’s tired, Diane said, and she’s made it clear she hopes he slows down after the 20th anniversary of the event that has served as the pivot point for his life’s work.

“He’s doing a lot of good out there, and he has a lot to bring to the table,” she told CNN. “But I worry about his health, because it hasn’t been great. I see it in his face, how exhausted he is.”

For a man who’s been working since he was a kid, “I can’t imagine myself being completely retired,” Frank said. And he knows he’ll always want to help suffering communities. But he admits he needs to lighten his load.

“I’m looking at the 20-year remembrance as, I need to reevaluate,” he said. “I need to be able to give myself permission to relax. I need to give myself permission.”

When he retired, Frank said, Diane told him she worried he would fall into a depression because he would no longer be associated with Columbine. Around that time, he began worrying about his own health and suffered with anxiety. But the doctor told him he was fine.

Then, he visited another expert who pinpointed the problem. “You have been a part of Columbine for 35 years,” Frank’s therapist told him, he recalled. “And you feel that Columbine is Frank DeAngelis.”

That perspective set the stage for a new outlook, Frank said. It’s one he says he wants to embrace, though it may require as much determination as any hurdle he’s conquered yet.

“He made me realize that Columbine is not going to define me. And that helped a lot,” the former principal said. “I’ve just got to get it in my mind that it’s OK.”

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A MIRROR; A WITNESS

I began avidly attending the Christian youth group in my Littleton, Colorado neighborhood a few months before the Columbine shootings in the spring of 1999. I was only 13, but I’d already been baptized twice by that point: once in a Catholic ceremony to please my Dad, and then again in a Mormon Temple at the insistence of my Mom. Both baptisms happened within a year of my 7th birthday.

After a terrible divorce that dragged on for years, my parents each decided that my siblings and I should be baptized into the religion of their upbringing. My Dad, who was raised Catholic, decided he’d give Mormonism a try in a move to please my Mom’s conservative family. A few years after the marriage went south, he decided he was definitely Catholic again and that my siblings and I should be too. And so, every weekend from the time I was 7 to 12 years old, we bounced from Catholic mass to Mormon service; from my mom’s spotless house in the suburbs to whatever friend’s basement or apartment my Dad happened to be renting that month. I am aware now that we were used as ammunition in my parents’ war against each other, and that’s probably why I clung to the things I did so desperately in my youth. When your family is broken, it makes sense that you would try to cobble together a new one out of the materials around you.

My neighbor Chris was the one who first invited me to youth group. Imagine how awkward you were when you were 13. Now imagine someone much, much more awkward. 6-ft tall, braces, unfortunately-bleached hair and perpetually unsure of what to say and where to stand. I had no idea how to live in my own body back then, so I thought the best thing to do was to stay as quiet as possible. For some reason, I had it in my mind that I wouldn’t live past 15 or 16. Some dark fate was patiently waiting to have its way with me; I was sure of it. I had no friends, so when Chris offered me the prospect of his company, I jumped at it. He was the first person I ever really trusted and something about his honest nature won me over immediately. He skateboarded, so I skateboarded. “I’m going to this thing at my church tonight,” he said. “We can skate on the stairs there.” My friendship with Chris led to other friendships, and I began to feel at home at the youth group.

Later that summer, I was convinced I heard God talking to me in my bedroom. I remember feeling loved, understood and called to something. I’m tempted now to write off the whole experience and claim that a high of happiness from finally attaining friends and a sense of belonging caused me to blindly follow my new church’s urging for non-believers to accept Christ into their hearts, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Whether what happened that day occurred within the confines of my mind or not doesn’t matter because the experience was vividly real to me. In a single afternoon, I absorbed the unshakable belief that there was a God who knew and loved me. Can you really call it faith when you’re completely convinced of something? The next day, I announced to my family that I’d become a Christian. I scheduled a 3rd baptism, this time in the religion and location of my choosing.

I loved the portable God the youth group would preach about. It was a God who listened and loved completely; an omnipotent force vaster and older than the entire universe itself that could shrink down small enough to fit inside your breast pocket. It was a God that could intervene between you and death if you could find enough faith to let it to. I took my portable God everywhere. I told it all my secrets.

For the next 5 years and throughout my time in high school, God and the youth group became the center of my life. I started going to youth group on Sunday nights and then for bible study on Tuesdays. It wasn’t long until I found myself hanging out in the church youth building every afternoon after school. I learned to play the guitar and joined the church band. My friends thought I was funny, so I traded in my silent demeanor for one more raucous and bombastic. I had learned to adapt. I was never cool, but everyone knew me and I knew everyone.

Everyone in our youth group idolized the youth leaders, and I dreamed about becoming one and working at the church after I graduated from high school. You were only asked to be a youth leader if you were attractive, well liked and spiritually pristine. “Jesus didn’t want to hang out with the flashy, popular people,” they’d tell us. “Jesus hung out with the dregs of society. If he were here, he’d want to hang out with the losers; the kid stacking chairs after service when nobody sees. That’s how you store treasure in heaven, guys. You should ask yourselves if you’re someone that Christ would want to hang out with if he were here walking around today.”

At home, my mom would tell me that I was spending too much time at church and that I needed to spend more time with the family. My response to my mom’s concerns always touched on the fact that I was a good, solid kid who was staying out of trouble. “I don’t do drugs, I don’t have sex and I’m a good person. You don’t have to worry about me,” I would tell her. The church is my real family, I told my portable God. “I don’t like this new church you’re going to,” my Dad warned. “You spend too much time there. You’d better get confirmed by the Catholic church or I’m afraid for your soul, Patrick!” Considering myself to be the moral leader of my family, I saw the concerns of my parents as nothing more than obstacles to my happiness and spiritual fulfillment. When I was 15, I wrote a letter to my older sister living in New York explaining that I was concerned about her “decision” to be a lesbian and that she should try to seek God and his forgiveness; an act that remains one of my largest and most embarrassing regrets to date.

In the years after Columbine, the youth group ballooned from 50 kids to over 300. An intangible urgency seemed to penetrate everything we did back then. You heard this a lot from Littleton residents, but it was absolutely true that Columbine High School was the last place in the world you’d expect for a massacre to happen. This was years before Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech and the thought of kids murdering other kids inside a suburban public high school was unfathomable. Everyone in Littleton knew someone impacted by the shootings, and a girl from our church named Cassie Bernall was killed.

Columbine happened while I was still in middle school, and I went to another Littleton high school near my house my freshman year. Cassie was a few years older than me, so I never met her. After the shootings, the news started reporting that one of the shooters asked Cassie if she believed in God and then shot her for saying yes. Cassie’s mom wrote a book about it called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie BernallOver the next four years, our church traveled to major cities all over the US to give away copies of the book to anyone who’d take them. “Walk up to people and just tell them, ‘This is a book about my friend who was killed at Columbine’,” our youth leaders enthusiastically instructed us on a trip to New York City in the Summer of 2000.

“This is a book about my friend who died at Columbine High School for believing in God,” I said while approaching a bookish man in Central Park. “I read about this last year,” he said, backing away from me slightly. “I’m sorry about your friend, but this didn’t happen. They were just shooting people at random whether they were Christians or not. What you guys are doing out here… it isn’t right.” He walked past me, leaving the book in my hand.

I hated the man for what he’d said. Yes, I lied when I said that Cassie had been my friend, but why was he going out of his way to tell me this? My church was heavily invested in making sure we knew that the people who didn’t follow Christ would hate us for our devotion to God, and I was sure that the man represented the world and its disdain for me and everyone who followed Christ. Though the early accounts of Cassie’s martyrdom were discredited by major news outlets just months after the massacre, I didn’t accept what the man said as truth until I was well into my twenties. Later that day, we went to the top of one of the World Trade Center buildings. I leaned my head against the glass and looked down, wondering what it’d feel like if I had to jump.

The church taught us to believe that a lust for anything other than God was perversion, and I really believed it. I loved my portable God and I wanted to do right by him. “You can have all the sex you want,” our carpenter-ish youth pastor used to tell us, “once you’re married.” I hated the idea of sex. I didn’t understand it; what it meant and why I wanted it so much despite my best efforts to put it outside my thoughts. I didn’t understand why I had to engage in an act as permanent as marriage just to experience it. I found it easier to deem it a toxic threat than to try to see my sexuality as something positive.

I’d decide that I liked someone and would go out of my way not to look at or talk to her out of fear and resentment, taking note with joy and annoyance whenever she’d walk into the room. Like many conservative Christian churches, ours taught a message of all-or-nothing abstinence before marriage. When I was a 16, a pretty senior in one of my classes wrote me a note explaining that she thought I was funny and cute, and that she wanted to sleep with me before leaving Colorado for the summer. Normal high school boys would’ve jumped at this opportunity, but not me. I threw away the note and didn’t talk to her for the rest of the year.

Guys in the youth group were encouraged to read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book arguing that unmarried Christian men should court girls rather than date them. The book preached a similar message to the one I was hearing in church, claiming that masturbation and premarital sex were covert ways for Satan to gain a foothold in our lives, and that God would give us everything we needed to remain pure in our young thoughts and actions. I liked the categorical nature of these teachings and was more than happy to put sex in all my bad categories. Years after I finally left my church and religion altogether, a friend told me that a group of young guys from the youth group were researching chemical castration online; a sure-fire way to drown out every sexual feeling with pristine, medicinally-induced white noise. The hatred and fear of my own sexuality still loomed large in my thoughts for many years after I stopped believing that sex was a curse to be avoided. I couldn’t see it right away, but a deep shame had taken residence in the inaccessible corners of my mind. Guilt, not Satan, had gained a foothold in my life.

I’m still good friends with most everyone I knew from my youth group days, and it’s interesting to see us now as adults. It’s like we all experienced everything a normal person does in high school, just years later. Many of us succumbed to the world and its vices in our twenties rather than our teens: drugs, premarital sex, and drinking. I eventually drank alcohol, tried pot a few times and then a long, long time later had sex out of wedlock on a rainy March night when I was 24 years old.

I remember the night I finally lost it. The kiss. The offer. Whole body shaking on the walk up the stairs. The freedom and relief of it. The subsequent terrible relationship that I stayed in for more than a year because I didn’t have enough experience to know better. I haven’t asked around or anything, but I don’t think it’s normal for a consenting adult to shake out of fear when they have sex for the first time. After it was over, it felt like — and I truly remember thinking this that night — like I was finally joining the human race. I doubt I’ll ever feel so much relief and ease again in my life.

Chris was the first one of us to leave the youth group. He told me that God didn’t want him there anymore, and I was shocked. When the youth leaders heard the news, they took me aside after the service one morning and cried. One of the youth leaders blamed his departure on his strained relationship with his alcoholic father. A few months later, I left too. In the spring before my high school graduation, my friend Ryan died in a car accident. In the wake of his death, everything began to seem small to me: the church, its teachings and the categorical world I’d curated for myself. Sometimes our youth pastor would pace around the stage and say, “I’ve got some really profound lessons I could teach you guys, but you’re just not ready for it.” One night, in lieu of the normal Sunday night sermon, a different youth pastor talked for 45 minutes about how he flew to Hawaii to meet Scott Stapp, the lead singer of Creed.

No one could articulate it at the time, but my friends and I began to realize that there was something off about our church. A rumor had gone around Littleton that our church was a cult, and I finally understood why when I left. Sometimes you need to be far away from something in order to see it for what it really is. I graduated, moved to Seattle for a few months and began feeling spiritually desperate and anxious. Not sure of what to do, I signed up for classes at a Christian university in northern California.

The Christian college I attended was the kind of place where people would walk up to you and say, “Hey bro! You’ve been on my heart lately. Can I pray for you?”, and then they’d lay their hands on you and other people would lay their hands on you and then everyone would start praying out loud right there in the middle of campus even if you were late for class and didn’t want to be touched. Students were required to adhere to a strict curfew even though they were adults. Being found in the dorm room of someone from the opposite gender was a serious offense. I agreed to these rules because in my mind limits and boundaries were tantamount to faith and righteousness. I needed rules. Ever since I’d left my church in Littleton, my faith had begun to slowly creak, fracture and break apart like an old wooden ship in a hurricane. Christian college was my Hail Mary Pass; my last chance to stave off my doubts, questions and anger about what people did in the name of God.

“Hey, Pat McCrotch. Looks like your boys are losing,” said my college roommate while watching coverage of the 2004 election. By “boys” he was referring to the democrats. We never talked about it, but he sensed that I was one of those liberal kids who didn’t like George Bush and the war in Iraq.

“You know man, I just hate how ‘cool’ all the liberals think they are. It’s like, you’re not cool unless you hate George Bush or something. Bush is a good Christian, and he’s just doing what’s right for the country. Of course people aren’t going to like him for doing the right thing.” Choosing not to waste my energy on a useless argument, I responded with a “hmmmm” sound and left the dorm.

On a walk around the drab campus, I prayed. I asked my portable God to help me fight my body and its impurities. I asked it to help keep me company, and for guidance. I prayed for the faith, fortitude and clarity to do the will of Christ and I apologized for being such a disgusting, wretched human being. Mid-prayer, my thoughts began to float off to some other place. I was finding more and more that the emotional well of prayer was running dry for me. The dramatic inner ritual of self hatred, pleads for forgiveness and a promise to do better and was beginning to wear me out. It didn’t feel genuine anymore. Without the emotional payoff or prayer, I couldn’t keep from questioning the nature of my relationship with God. I had begun to ask myself questions I couldn’t answer. Why would God specifically design a person to be gay and then later condemn them for it? Why are there children who die of cancer? Suffering is understandable if it leads to growth or good, but what about when it doesn’t?

Late one night with some friends at a Denny’s near campus, I casually mentioned the odd religious makeup of my family: Mom was now agnostic, Dad was still staunchly Catholic, and everyone else ranged from casual Christian to atheist. My friend Josh looked down at the table and sighed. “Pat, you know what this means, right? Your family….they’re not saved. They’re going to hell unless they accept Christ fully like you have. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that. But that’s why being a witness is so powerful and important. You’re the light of your family.” I was stunned. The version of God I’d constructed for myself was a force filled with love, patience and understanding, not a terrifying entity with a penchant for sadistic punishment. If God was love, why would he punish my family for not being Christians or Christian enough by throwing them in hell forever? Where is the lesson to be learned in that? My church was conservative, but not “Your-family-is-going-to-hell” conservative.

“That’s a lot to think about,” I said, looking down and stirring my coffee. Everything began to seem absurd to me. Maybe God and conventional religion were really just mirrors; powerful vehicles for the things you already believed to be sent back to you renewed and unshakable.

Shortly after the beginning of my second semester, I decided to come back to Colorado to finish my degree at a public university. I began to finally admit to myself that I just didn’t believe in God anymore. Those were dark times. Without a God, I had no identity; spiritual or otherwise. My faith had been my shield, and without it I felt vulnerable and deeply sad. It’s weird to go from thinking you can cheat death to accepting the finite nature of your own life. “Dying is the one thing we all must do,” as my sister says.

The last time I remember praying was when I was 22. I was drinking with some friends downtown, and every time I left the table or looked away they’d fill my glass up to the top with vodka. I knew what they were doing, but I pretended like I had no idea. It was the beginning of Summer, and after being dropped off I ambled toward the lake near my house through the tepid night air. “Y’know what?,” I slurred aloud, “I tried to be what you wanted. And I was fuckin’ good. Really good.” I fell down on the grass and laughed. “Don’t you have anything to say? D’you even miss me?” Everything was quiet other than the low hum of my own shifting thoughts. The night, God and anything else that might’ve been listening was indifferent to me.

This essay was originally written for the Nervous In Public blog in June 2016