Turning Points (Class of 2020 Senior Farewell Part 2)

For the seniors of the class of 2020 and the years of students in their wake, the words below represent my best attempt at putting all the thoughts of this spring together into one place. 

The air was warm. The sun was out. I was 15 years old and doing what 15 year olds do, I was leaving campus to have lunch with my friends. I walked into my friend's house to see what we could pilfer from his parents refrigerator. His older sister, two years older than us was already sitting in the living room watching TV and eating her lunch. I will never forget her looking up from her lunch and saying "there was a shooting at a school in Colorado."

At first I totally dismissed it. I had grown up watching movies like Dangerous Minds where kids were just getting killed left and right because they were in "bad places." I think that I had assigned myself as safe from any real threat to my life because I was in Arvada, and well, bad things don't happen in Arvada, right?

We ate whatever we found in the cupboard, had some laughs and drove back to school for our fifth period classes. When I walked into class, the tube TV mounted to the corner of the classroom was already on to the news, and what I watched unfurl in front of me on live TV changed my life forever. 

The day that I am talking about is April 20, 1999, the day that two young men walked into Columbine High School and killed 12 of their classmates and 1 teacher and injured countless others. 

In a lot of hard ways, my childhood ended that day without me fully realizing the brevity of what had happened. What I did know was that I had been to Columbine for several cross country meets, and they were a school situated in a suburb much like ours. Kids who attended Columbine looked, acted, and ran just like me. There was a shared humanity I could not fully explain inside of me other than knowing that it hurt my heart to know that they were gone and people like me were suffering.

In the days, weeks, and years that followed a lot of things changed in my day to day life. Instead of freely coming and going to school, I had to enter and exit through a single entrance. School security overnight went from not existing to existing in my perfect little world. I became painfully aware of the loaded handgun on the belt of the school resource officer. To this day, I have to show ID when I enter locked school buildings every day of the week. Lot's of things changed, but eventually life felt normal again. A little sadder, and a little harder, but normal and ok, and the world still generally felt like it was built for human flourishing even though I was now aware that life wasn't going to be perfect.

A little bit more than two years later, I had graduated from high school and was attending Metro State in downtown Denver. I was driving my 1988 4Runner with the way too big stereo downtown when my normal lighthearted morning show broke into the news and they started describing an "apocalyptic scene in New York City." It didn't register whatsoever with me. I turned the radio off and put on a CD and drove the rest of the way to school. 

I walked into my first class of the day. The projector was already on. My professor was sitting there with about 10 other kids in a class of 30 who had showed up to class that day. The professor had a look on his face I will never have the words to explain. Still not knowing what was going on, I sat down in a desk, and within seconds watched an airplane fly into the World Trade Center. 

I sat there for several hours, just watching, dumbfounded, silenced by the weight of the moment. Eventually I walked out of class and drove home. On my walk back to my car, I remember staring up at the buildings in Denver and thinking about what it must be like to be standing in New York that day. 

Once again, my sense of normalcy and safety was completely shattered. I had never really thought much about the idea that the United States had enemies that would want to do us harm just because we are Americans, and we represent something that has done something dark in their lives. Overnight, air travel totally changed. All professional sports in the United States stopped. Eventually, our country went to war, a war that is still happening for reasons that the people fighting it may not even know, understand or remember. 

But on my end... life eventually went on. It was harder this time. Friends went to war. I realized that I had to make real adult decisions every day that had real geopolitical consequences. This seemed unfair at 18. Things got normal again. A different normal, but normal none the less and eventually I once again believed that the world was capable of human flourishing, because it was. The feeling of normal did not mean that the troubles of the world disappeared, it just meant that I was getting used to how things would be.

Class of 2020, and those who will follow you, we are having ourselves a moment. A moment that will change our lives and the way we do life for some amount of time. I wish that the stories that I just told just made me unique, but ask any adult about their generational moments, and they will tell you about things like Pearl Harbor, V-E day, the Kennedy assassination(s), the Challenger exploding and the list goes on. These things hurt, these things shatter some of the assumptions that we have made about how our lives are going to go, but you have to believe that eventually things will feel ok again.

The events that I described above were all much shorter than what we are going through now. Early on, I thought that this was going to be over much sooner than has proved itself true. I sat down and addressed post cards to each and every senior to encourage you that we were going to be ok, that track season was going to happen, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, etc. I never got to write those post cards. They are still sitting on my desk. They will leave my house some time soon, because I miss you guys, and I never really got to say goodbye. 

The mindset I have adopted is not centered on any particular date for this to end, just that it will, and that we will all begin to feel normal again. My goals right now are to do everything in my power to keep the people around me safe, lead where I have been called, follow where I have been asked and wait for this to end. Normal is going to be different after this, but there will be a normal again.

Class of 2020, you were promised so much more than you received. You deserved a better ending than the one you got, that is indisputable. I am sorry that you had to deal with the world at large sooner than I think any of you would have liked. I have said this from the beginning, and I will say it forever, you were a class like none other. It seems fitting that your finale had to be so unique. Your graduation drive thru and eventual ceremony was a once in a lifetime experience, and I state that as a person that has been to way more graduations than I can count.

I want to leave you with three thoughts:

Thought 1: There are three competing versions of reality surrounding you every day. Two competing versions will be served up to you on different news channels and media outlets and you will be asked to take a side. It is fair and expected that eventually you will if you have not already. The third version of reality is the most important... it is the actual reality that you live in. You live in a pluralistic society full of people you agree and disagree with. Do your best to love both well. Run as fast as you can from anyone who tries to tell you that what you are seeing and believing is not real and that they are your only filter for truth.

Thought 2: Find your north star and orient your life and choices around that. The better you know yourself, your intentions and your goals in life, the sooner you will realize the things that feed you and give you life. It is easy to be fed at 19 when the world feels small, and you have not experienced a ton of life. Find something that will feed you when you're 29, 39 and 109. 

Thought 3: You have spent the last 4+ years learning how to run. Some of you will never stop running, some of you stopped on March 13th. Know that running is always there, waiting for you, any time you need it. The same is true of Coach Witkowski and I. Graduating from high school does not mean graduating from one another's lives. 

Don't be a stranger guys. See you out on the trail.