How Do You Even Start Processing This? And Why Do We Have To?
The Boulder mass shooting was too close to home--but more than that, it reminded me of the absurdity that we have collectively decided that routine massive social trauma is preferable to action.
I went to that King Soopers so frequently as a freshman and sophomore in high school. About a half mile from Fairview High, it was the intersection of close and cheap, a walkable place to go off-campus to just… get away for an hour with friends in the middle of the school day. We’d wander down to the store and walk aimlessly through the aisles, chatting about nothing that seemed like the most important thing at the time, buying fried chicken and raspberry lemonade for $5 total. It was a weekly ritual for myself and so many friends before we had cars. It still is for so many other kids.
Later, when we’d come home from college and meet up at one of our friends’ family homes in South Boulder, we’d joke that there’s a pack of cheap scones that you can only find when you’ve had a few drinks—mediocre but legendary. Inexplicably but happily cemented into our lives.
It seems weird on face to have this much reverence for a grocery store, but that particular store really is a gatheringplace, a sort of community center, for that part of town. If you’ve never been, South Boulder is sort of off in its own corner, not walkable to the downtown areas like Pearl Street Mall or The Hill, not even walkable to CU Boulder’s campus. King Soopers is the place everyone in SoBo goes to shop—everyone. For the longest time it was the only grocery store nearby.
Around the corner, maybe 150 feet from the grocery store, there’s the Abo’s Pizza where my friends and I would go get food if we were feeling fancy. There’s the famous Neptune Mountaineering store on the other side of the strip mall. There’s Caffe Sole, where I had my Middlebury admissions interview in a blizzard. There’s Under the Sun, the bar that my friends and I still go to every single winter without fail when everyone’s back home visiting family. It’s safe, it’s happy, it’s home.
And a shooter ripped that sense of community and home apart yesterday, and took ten lives.
Since my job is to research extremism and terrorism, much of which involves genocidal and senseless violence, I know well how readily we cope and compartmentalize mass shootings when they happen far away from us. I know well that we have to compartmentalize or we’ll lose our minds. But when the mass shooting epidemic strikes close to home, it floods your spirit with anguish, grief, confusion, and anger. All those carefully constructed barricades to emotional trauma are washed away like levies in a storm surge. All those methodically developed compartmentalization skills rendered useless. All you can think about is the discordance of violence like this happening in your backyard, in that place you grew up. As if a machine that’s been running smoothly has suddenly gotten out of sync and all you can hear is the grinding of gears. Something’s deeply wrong. Something’s broken. How can we go back to the way it was?
How do you even remotely attempt to process something like this? Why are we, as Americans, continually expected to process these events? Why do we have to do this, week after week after week, while congresspeople sit on their hands and complain about how doing anything to confront mass shootings would be like punishing sober drivers for the crimes of drunk drivers? Why have we decided that traumatizing society on a mass scale is preferable to even considering policies like making acquiring a gun as hard as learning how to drive or getting an abortion?
I wrote a Twitter thread yesterday on one of the underdiscussed impacts of mass shootings: the creation of a paranoid strain of American schooling. I was six years old when I was first taught what to do in an active shooter situation. Nowadays, kids in pre-K do active shooter drills on a frequent basis.
When pre-teen kids talk with their friends in detail about what they’d do in a mass shooting, society has spectacularly failed.
I don’t know the answers. There are issues with gun control legislation, although we know that without guns there would obviously not be mass shootings. I know too that the policies we know help with preventing radicalization, like mental health support, extensive socializing opportunities, and media literacy, would probably help with shootings.
What I do know is that I want everyone to know just how much Boulder means to the people who live there (and even those, like myself, who never got to live IN Boulder but had the privilege of growing up there in school nonetheless). It’s a town that has issues, that’s too expensive, that’s too exclusive, but is also diverse, rich in culture, dense in weirdness and personal expression, hospitable, helpful, brilliant, outdoorsy, engaged, and worldly. I would not be who I am without my time spent just being there. And each community that is similarly rent by mass shootings is like this. Shootings aim to disrupt and destroy the fabric of society. Don’t let them succeed.