#walkupnotout

This has to do with death, so I think I can slip by here. 

I did not walk out. Everyone keeps asking me why with incredulous faces, and I’ve gotten tired of explaining. 

Of course, of course, I care about the lives have been lost. It’s tragic and terrifying and awful. 

But in my opinion, walking out of school isn’t going to fix this. Being silent isn’t going to fix this. We need to honor these lost lives with action. We need to address the problem. How, I’m not yet entirely sure. 

My mom showed me a Facebook post the other day when I was talking about the walk out. It said that we should walk up instead of walk out. That if we see someone who always seems to be alone, we should walk up and talk to them. We should spread kindness instead of rifts and fear. It’s not a solution, but it sure is a start. 

I’m not gonna post that video because it’s VERY triggering and kinda victim-blamey. (Not saying nobody can post it/not “cancelling” the video or anything, just a personal choice to post something else instead.)

As someone who knew an almost-school-attacker, I can tell you this--YES I FUCKING SAW THE WARNING SIGNS. DOZENS OF PEOPLE SAW THE WARNING SIGNS.

They young, smart, white, male could NOT have more obviously been a powder-keg of violence. And I didn’t even know him well. Just. He openly admired serial killers, he openly spoke (in front of adults too! Who never even confronted this line of thinking!) about how it was morally justifiable to kill children in the name of fighting Communism...and those were just my interactions with him...

I was so, so lucky. 

Because someone else saw the warning signs. And unlike me, that someone else also found hard evidence of a specific planned attack. And that someone else told the school, who told the FBI, who stopped the attack.

We didn’t even miss school.

Here’s the story of someone less lucky than me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/nikolas-cruz-shooting-florida.html

The would-be killer I knew HAD friends. He wasn’t being bullied, to my knowledge. He was treated well by everyone, more or less. #WalkUpNotOut wouldn’t have helped him, because he was rarely alone enough to warrant walking up to.

I don’t know why he did it. But I wonder, if his parents had had an unlocked AR-15 with ammunition in their homes, if he had had the opportunity to make a shooting and not a bomb threat, I--

No.

I don’t wonder.

He was in my homeroom.

Jesus Christ, everything about this is painful.

deputychairman replied to your post “I Was Held At Gunpoint By A Bullied Kid”

Dude. What a terrifying story, both the gun part and the awful neglected classroom environment

It was a bad time. 

To be fair to the school, the year before us, my sister’s class of 96, was dominated from about 4th grade onwards by a strong-minded clique of straight-A female jocks, with my sister near the helm. (Her record for the 400m hurdles adorned the gym wall for at least 20 years. She still bears the scars: hurdles are brutal.) Small rural districts like that are very subject to the vagaries of demographic variation, and strong personalities. They couldn’t have understood what a festering cesspool of awful the Class of 97 really was. (97 later went on to throw a firecracker down a toilet, call in innumerable bomb threats, and set a classroom on fire, after I left.) The surrounding years were mostly good kids who mostly did the best they could with the school’s limited resources and tax base. They added on a big auditorium not long after I left, and separated middle school out into its own buildings and stopped treating 5th graders like little kids, and added all kinds of security measures...

And I went to private school for high school. My three sisters all thrived at that central school, and my mother taught there-- which is possibly why I’m so aware of what had been going on behind the scenes. She had been very close with my 4th grade teacher, and so had been in on their earnest and well-informed attempts to gerrymander the 5th grade class lists into something that might be survivable. (For the record my 4th grade year was fucking awesome, there were only 18 of us in that section and 12 of us were girls, and this was before they started doing state-mandated standardized testing for the entire 4th grade year. I really started to blossom in 4th grade, so it was extra awful when I had to grow a shell in 5th.)

But. As a consolation, I searched on the teacher’s name, which I do remember very clearly, and she’s not on Facebook but one of those sketchy White Pages “Find Anyone” sites threw up a photo that I totally recognize as her, only old (she’d be a little over 70 now), and in the photo she’s holding a small child and looking happy, clearly it’s a grandkid, and it tied her to an address in FL. So she got out of it ok in the end, I guess. I would love to hear what she thinks about all of this now; it would be fantastic if some of these #walkupnotout dumbasses interviewed her. (Though, to be fair, she might think that just because she talked a shooter down, anyone could; you never know how something will strike someone.)

I can’t find the boy. He might have spelled it Jarod or Jerrod or Jarred or Jerad or something, the only results I get with his first name as I remember it, plus his last name which I know I have right, are ancestry.com results from the eighteenth century. It’s perfectly likely he’s succumbed to the opiate epidemic, though; at least one of my worst bullies did a couple years back and I know it’s swept through that demographic like wildfire.