It's another thought about the NEWS, I guess.

I was on campus at the time of the Florida State University mass shooting.

I do not like putting personal identifying information on the internet. I've begun to value my privacy when existing anywhere, whether it be on the internet or otherwise. I respect internal reflection more than sharing thoughts to the mass public. However, I have found that my only option in this particular situation is to write. The best I can do is put my words on my website, leave them there as if I locked them up in a diary, and then call it a day.

Time has passed a little bit since that day. Fathers have been laid to rest and students have been discharged from the hospital. Finals have passed. I've been talking with others and observing the new daily life around me. The grand overarching thesis I've taken to heart is: everyone experiences things differently. No matter how obvious or commonplace the statement is, you don't truly realize the wide breadth of what the phrase "experiences things differently" means until you are all stuck together in a surreal situation.

There is no metric nor science to what you must go through, what the truth is, or what happened that means you should be feeling a certain way. I'm a very jumpy and anxious person, yet I felt fine and secure while I sprung to act during the active shooter alarm. I continue to feel fine overall. If anything, I'd say I feel a dull anger. It is a different sort of anger than that of an activist rightfully trying to change horrid laws and regulations or an institution's hypocritical actions (though I do too feel that). No... I feel angry about how the world is an onlooker, reacting and discussing the events. It just another moment in history, but this time I was in-person watching.

There is a difference between being mad at a tragedy and being there. Not only am I mad that something bad happened, but I also know these landmarks, these people, this town, et cetera et cetera.

There's something to say about the strange experience of having an intimate perspective on something that is on national and international news, and that's to put it most simply. I've experienced this before: I've written previously (publicly or otherwise) about my dear friend who died. Due to circumstances outside of his or his loved one's control, he became the subject of many, many articles beyond the scope of a normal man's obituary. It's not normal to see the fact of a beloved friend on supermarket magazines. It's the raw definition of the word surreal to see a friend—normal as he was—placed next to celebrities who've lost weight or moved in together. It is not normal to see them on scrolling news tickers or while you're trying to check your email. It didn't help that the world thought he looked a certain way: off, distant, obvious. The perfect actor for the part of a lonely, sad article. As if there was only one outcome for someone like that: to die.

It is also not normal to experience a school shooting.

I'm a person who sees patterns, connects the dots... and I find that it is in a human's nature to do so. Humans had to learn what foods were safe and what animals to fear in order to survive, and creating patterns made that process easier and faster. We often complain about people comparing real-life to books, movies, other events... but I think it's just a human need to compare and process (some could definitely benefit from diversifying their reference material, that I agree). Although very different than a school shooting, I find myself being reminded of the death of my friend.

One part of it is that they are something big—bigger than any one human can comprehend because it is a very unique situation. Everyone has or will have lost someone, but not everyone will have lost someone in a... grand spectacle shown to the masses. It's hard to navigate something like that. There's a concept that's called some variation of "the Club No One Wants to Join". I've seen it commonly as the alternate, colloquial name for support groups of parents who outlived their children. People find themselves in all types of the Club No One Wants to Join: cancer patients, widows, victims of horrific crimes... Only other members of the club seem to understand the experience at a level that allows for deep, advanced conversation.

The other part of it is the reality that people from all over, who have never met you or your peers nor have been to the area, have opinions and thoughts about the NEWS.

For example, I've learned that it's common for a mass shooting to be reported as multiple shooters due to echoes, multiple perspectives, and the police response. I've learned that you have to take all of it seriously while you're sitting in a dark windowless room, barricaded, with the only access to the outside world being texts and the news. You are in the dark, managing a room full of assorted random staff members and students you found, sitting and watching the current American president dismiss the event as a thing that happens. It happens. You sit in a room in the dark and watch the news broadcast your university's student union, where you'd just been an hour prior, full of police.

And then, for example, you go home. You're safe, and you get to go home. You are sitting at home on a couch after sitting for four hours on the ground in what is essentially a closet. Your back already hurts from a previous injury, but you suppose it is preferable to being shot—of course! You watch a broadcast of the press conference, which has gone live only 30 minutes after you get home safely. You learn things about what just happened. You observe. Someone texts you as they watch it too, living hours and hours away from the city. "So sorry this happened to you," they say, "it's something you will never forget." Said as if this were a once-in-a-lifetime trip to fucking Disney World.

You remember being a teenager and watching the Parkland Shooting unfold hours away from you, for example. You're the same age as those high schoolers, and you live in the same state. You remember even further back, being eight years old, and doing lockdown drills in elementary school. They said that, for example, a strange man could walk on the school grounds, leave a suitcase, and then run away. The police would have to come and secure the possible bomb threat, so you must stay quiet and sit in the dark closet.

According to Wikipedia, when you started primary school there were less than a dozen or so in the USA a year. Now the average is several dozen. Bomb threats became guns, somehow.

It is a sad fact that so many young people and children belong to the Club No One Wants to Join about mass shootings. 

We know what we observe. Lots of people make assumptions based on half-baked or flat-out wrong information. They say cruel things because they are so disconnected to the event. It matters not if the event was merely a young man found dead or if it was a mass shooting at a place of higher education. People do not think of words on the screen or on pages as real things, connected to real people. They are historical incidents. They are things that happen. The victims will be "remembered" and the criminal is the "enemy". Men die in water. Men die by bullets.

I'd rather not discuss and highlight the cruel men who do cruel deeds, but in this case I can't but help keep an eye on what will become of the shooter. I can't help but think of how he has been found idolizing white supremacist views, misogynist views, Nazi icons, fascism... I can't help but note how there were several planned events in the area for later that day, near where the shooting occurred, that were ironically cancelled due to the violence. One of those events was in memory of the Tallahassee Yoga Studio Shooting, where an FSU student (Maura Binkley) and a faculty member (Nancy Van Vessem) were killed. That shooting was an attack of misogynist terrorism. The other event was a protest to help protect international students from sudden kidnapping and deportation without warning. The shooter had previously made fun of the group protesting the president earlier in the year. As of now it could be a coincidence, but what a ironic set of details.

There's more police around now, for protection. International students are scared to go by the student union, the site of the shooting, because in addition to it being a space of tragedy, they fear unmarked men will forcibly take them away, unaware and uninformed that the government revoked their right to an education in the United States. As with most acts of terrorism, the terror goes beyond that of the inciting incident. The bigoted shooter got what he surely wanted: striking fear into innocent lives.

In the same way I'd rather not know anything about the cruel criminals that hurt people, I'd also rather live in a world where I never knew the names of those who've died by violence. I'd rather know people's names from their valiant efforts. I want to know men by how loving they were to children, watching them support students as they walk through campus. I want to know women by how educated they are, doing good work by increasing literacy in a small town. I don't want to know them because they died young, by the hands of a hateful man. I don't want to hear how they loved football, I want to hear their voice speak their own thoughts. I want a world where there's no need to filter through the memories of the dead to give them a voice. I want to know a man's name because I love his photography and I'm reading it off the cover of his book—a book made for the merit of his hard work, rather than the easy effort of death.

Poems are better read on pages rather than tombstones.

I think (always) about my friend. Many people might have fleetingly read his name or known his face and then forgot about him, knowing only that he died, and that he was related to somebody that was related to something they knew. They'll not know him for his art. They won't know even know his own words. They don't even know what movies he loved or that he loved Bionicles. He is put into the archive of the world, stuck forever static within memories. Stuck as a statistic on [ insert health issue here ] / [ insert crime rate here ] / [ insert number ]. Stuck as a footnote on someone else's Wikipedia page.

I know many local people. All seem to have something to say about the shooting; we were all a part of it somehow. Not in the way of "I saw that on the news! You were there?" but instead "I went to church with that guy!" or "I work at the hospital," and then they give me another piece of the puzzle not meant to be solved for it's already been solved and we just can't do anything about it. I like talking about it, but I have no secrets. I have no answers. I have a lot to say, but none of it is "interesting", I assure you. 

Some people I know are very traumatized. I've watched them cry loudly, sob and wheeze as they gave out their thoughts for us to listen. Some people I know are "fine". If I gave you—yes, you—a card-matching game in which one column was what the person experienced and the other was their reaction to the situation, there would be no clear correlations. It matters not how close they were or what they know or what happened to them. Some people I know are angry. I find myself relating most to those that are. I don't know if I have a word to describe my feelings; that's why I'm here, writing, isn't it?

What am I to do? What's the point to writing all this? I feel so strongly, so deeply, and all information is important and connected. I was there. I am there. As I write this, I sit and look out my window at the flowers and gifts left on the sidewalk where a few weeks ago I had seen every type of police vehicle imaginable race down the brickwork and students run in the opposite direction right before the alarms sounded. I am there. I stand amongst others at the reopening of the union. I show my ID card. I am welcomed in. I am there. What am I to do? I am filled with such intensity but I have no outlet appropriate. I am not a protestor (I am not able to; I am not safe). Yet, I am also not one to ride the waves of normalcy until it finally comes my turn to be taken, killed, imprisoned, restricted, made less... It already is racing towards me. If it is not a gun, it is the government. The police protect me against the possibility of copycat killers but how do I know they do not also hate me. How do the immigrant students know they are not secret ICE agents there to kidnap them?

What do you do? With all of it? The nothingness (numbness, safety, business-as-usual) and the infinity (vast range of trauma intensity, the horror, the need for justice)? What does one do when it feels as if talking undermines the feelings of others?

I have no answers.