On an ordinary Tuesday morning in 1998, in the small town of Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys came to school armed with high-powered rifles. Just 11 and 13 years old, they opened fire on their classmates, left four children dead and 10 wounded, also killing an English teacher who had tried to shield a student.
As the heartbreaking news spread, everyone in the community — indeed, in the world — struggled to make sense of such a bizarre and frightening act. “Babies killing babies,” as one mother put it.
The unimaginable happened again a year later at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Two teenage boys smuggled in backpacks and duffle bags crammed with sawed-off shotguns, semi-automatic weapons and nearly a hundred bombs. In less than an hour, they shot dead 12 students and a teacher and left 24 wounded. If two of their bombs had gone off as planned, the devastation could have killed all 2,000-plus students. The boys ended the massacre by committing suicide.
The corridors at Columbine High soon filled with boxes of teddy bears, letters and cards and other expressions of sympathy.
“It felt good, but we never really went through them,” recalled Matt, who was a senior at Columbine when I met him two years later. “What we paid attention to was one item. And that’s still on the wall in the school: a poster created by the kids at Jonesboro and signed by all of them.”
Matt was with a group of high school students from Columbine, Jonesboro and Paducah (the site of an earlier school shooting) who had gathered at Ferncliff, a Presbyterian camp in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Five of the students met to articulate what they had learned from their experiences. Some had been injured in the gunfire, some had lost friends, all had been affected emotionally. They wanted to figure out how to guide themselves and others in dealing with future tragedies. Using the approach we’ve been talking about, they were asked to tell stories of when they had been at their best in the dark days of the shootings.
It may seem odd, or even unfeeling, to ask people to talk about their best moments — their high points — when they have suffered through such horror. Yet there were more such moments than even I could have imagined.
These young people shared and relived astonishing stories of compassion, of heroism, of strength. They came to understand the conditions that had supported their strengths. That knowledge, carefully harvested from the truths of their own experiences, led them to develop two key principles to guide them in the future.
The Jonesboro poster principle. Just “being there” with us is as important as words — maybe more important.
“We call it ‘accompaniment,’” David Gill, the camp’s director, told me. “I can’t make everything better, but I can accompany you on your journey. People in the early stages of trauma do not need to hear, ‘It will be okay.’ The mere presence of youth who have lived through a similar experience gives that message of encouragement and hopefulness, both to immediate victims and to the watching world.”
The victims-to-leaders principle. Becoming a leader is the best way to rise above being a victim.
The students had seen for themselves that being in service to others can be a potent affirmation of one’s self, as well as a path toward healing.
Guided by this hard-won wisdom, these young people stood ready to answer the call of the next school tragedy (which seemed, at the time, a near-certainty). Alongside their terrible memories, they added the ability to see images of the future they wanted and what they might do to bring it about.
The group filled a backpack to show us what their contribution could be. Matt pulled each item from the bag as he spoke.
“When it happens next,” he told us, “we’ll send a backpack filled with tissues for when they cry. With water because you get dehydrated when you cry. And with candy and Disney videos for when they begin to feel better and maybe can even laugh a little.”
A few months later, they were called on to ship 100 backpacks to a school in Minnesota.
To this day, I’m still deeply moved when I remember the time I spent with these young people.
Yet I hesitated telling you this story. There is something sacred about their experience that belongs to them. In the end, I wanted to honor their courage and wisdom by giving you the chance to learn from them, as I did. They showed me, in an especially poignant way, what can happen when the common discourse of despair is interrupted to draw attention to the life and hope in a situation.
They also taught me, one more time, that there are many ways to tell the story of an experience that we didn’t want to have. Even in our most difficult times, we can choose a narrative that gives us a new and stronger sense of our capabilities.
That sense might well include such human characteristics as courage, tenacity, resilience and faith, which can exist only if life holds challenges. “When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left,” the Sufi say.
In my own life, I can see my mother’s early death as a time of sadness and loss. From a different (perhaps more distant) vantage point, I’m able to see how that experience contributed to my sense of myself as strong and independent. Both accounts of that event can be called true, yet they shape my self-identity in very different ways.
Working with the great kids from Jonesboro, Columbine and Paducah also strengthened my conviction that people, including so-called “victims,” know a good deal more about their lives — and about what can be — than the “experts” who are trying to help them. Sure, there had been psychologists at each of the schools who did what they could to help the kids, to reassure them and teach them how to cope. But the students didn’t tell stories about receiving professional assistance; they told stories about how they had been there for each other.
There comes a time to trust ourselves and the wisdom that can be drawn from our own best experiences.
