Here’s an anniversary no one wants to celebrate: The Columbine school shooting — April 20, 1999 — just passed its 25th anniversary. Fifteen dead (including the two shooters), twenty-one injured. A new era begins . . .

Why, why, why bring up such a horrific event? Perhaps because it hasn’t stopped.

Even though I sit here in the comfort of my study, feeling perfectly safe, I can’t emotionally disentangle myself from the news, which is always, in one way or another, about the human need to kill itself — or rather, the human assumption that it’s divided from itself, and “the other,” whoever that other is, either needs to be killed or is, at best, expendable. For instance:

“The Senate has passed $95 billion in war aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden after months of delays and contentious debate over how involved the United States should be in foreign wars.”

So AP informs us, and immediately scenarios of screaming children, bombed aid workers, home and hospitals reduced to rubble, flash before me. No, these are not abstract scenarios! Part of me and part of you lie trapped in that rubble, or stunned and grieving over the sudden loss of your whole family. And all we seem to do is continue funding the process that makes this happen, as though a larger understanding of our existence is not available — certainly not at the level of global politics.

What is power? Is it simply and sheerly us vs. them, good vs. evil? Every war on Planet Earth is sold with this advertising slogan. Perhaps this is why I find myself thinking about the Columbine shootings — and all the mass shootings since then. Define an enemy, then kill it. This is what we learn in history class — but would-be mass shooters, caged in their own isolation, cross a line. They take this lesson personally.

And there’s a world of possibility that welcomes them, oh so ironically. In this world, the sword is mightier than the pen (or anything else). Power means power over. . . something. So if you’re a lost or wounded soul, imagining an enemy that needs to be destroyed is probably enormously tempting. If the world is going on without you, maybe you should do something to stop it. And the “world of possibility” — by which I mean far more than merely the “gun culture,” but the entirety of our culture of scripted violence, from global politics to the media to the entertainment industry — makes the loner’s imagined and insane solution, defining and killing an enemy, an actual possibility.

At the time of the Columbine........

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