Does it ever hit home for you?

I mean, do you ever have moments where all of this talk about 4/20 stops being an intellectual exercise and starts to sink in on a deeper level?

I'm pretty good at disconnecting and compartmentalizing, but sometimes even I get a bit overwhelmed by it.

(Note that I would never say, not in a million years, that I have even one-billionth of the degree of feeling that someone who was there had and still has.)

A few minutes ago, I was thinking about the bombs going off. Suddenly I saw the scene in my mind: flesh getting torn apart, kids getting ripped in half, body parts flying around with strings of gore hanging off of them. I saw a foot with bloody chunks of leg still stuck to it skidding across the floor, leaving a trail of blood. It hit me for the first time in a while that what Eric and Dylan wanted to do was really ... nasty.

I try not to think about the actual crimes - I try not to think about what happened in the library. I like to concentrate on the boys' psychology and their motivations. But when you think about what it must be like to be a boy who fires a gun and watches a bullet tear into someone else's body ... what must be going through the mind of someone who can do that, and then fire it again at someone else ... someone who sees what he is doing to other living, breathing human beings, and who knows what he is doing, and who does it over and over and over again ... that level of depravity is hard for me to fathom.

I know that I can never truly empathize with the victims, but when I think about what it must be like to be shot - to feel this projectile shattering the sanctity of your body - to be invaded by a piece of metal, and to have your flesh and fat and muscle and bone ripped apart like you're a hunk of meat or something ... I shudder for them, and I feel for them in a way that I typically don't.

Does this ever happen to anyone else? As I've said, most of the time, I try to keep things at an intellectual level of interest.

I can't get the thought of Matt and Isiah lying/resting under that table, their last thoughts being of torment and hate.

The other would be Danny(Rohrbough) as he remind me a lot of some one who would be my friend, It just makes me think about how the survivors and friends and family felt, words can't explain.

I don't know if this counts as it hitting home, but I rethought my interest this past week. A friend of mine from high school who had been addicted to meth for a couple years committed suicide. My knowledge of Columbine helped me see a sort of silver lining: At least he hadn't been murdered or killed someone else before he killed himself. He was the funniest guy in our high school and my best friend from 9th to 11th grade. I'm obviously shocked and sad about it, but at the same time, he was never 100% right in the head to start with and was obviously suffering (meth users are 80% likelier than most people to attempt suicide). So there is a silver lining in a way - he wasm't murdered by someone else and didn't take other people with him.

Yes, it's hit on a deeper level many times for me.

I work in a field that requires a certain level of emotional awareness, you have to detach yourself from the emotional aspects of the situation at hand in order to do your job. What it amounts to is an emotional disconnect.

I used to work in an inner city hospital and we'd get a lot of gunshot victim's in the E.R., it can be very hard to detach yourself from your emotions when you have a two-year-old with a GSW to the head, and hysterical parents, but you have to. I don't see that much anymore, thank god.

So when I was reading through the library victims/witnesses I thought I was handling it pretty well. Then I had a dream that I was in that library, under a table, watching kids get shot. I could only see the bottom of Eric and Dylan's legs. But I saw the kids getting shot in horrific clarity. It was pretty intense and left me feeling really disgusted by it all.

Mostly, I think about what they took away from those kids. Sure, they could have become Doctors and lawyers, etc., but those are just jobs, they took away a lot more than that.

I'm a fairly pessimistic person by nature. A lot of times I'll find myself thinking that this world is screwed, there's just to many mind-numbingly stupid people in it.

But then something will happen, someone will say something that is so funny that I'm laughing until my sides start hurting, or I'll hear a song that I love, one that really moves me and makes me feel better, or one of my boys will come up to me and give a huge hug for no particular reason.

All those little things, those moments and experiences that actually make life worth living, were torn away from those kids when Eric and Dylan callously pulled the trigger on them.

So yeah, the gravity of what they really did is never far from my mind.

It's very rare I think about what exactly it must have felt like have been in such a situation.

When I was a bit younger (maybe 17-22) I was terrified of death. I'd lay awake for hours at night wondering which was it would eventually take me.

I kind of got over it a bit but it still does worry me. I know there's the sayings like 'nothing's for sure but death and taxes' but maybe that's why I was/ am so afraid of it - it's gonna happen.

But having been in a good mindset for it for the last few years - I'm not looking forward to it and hopefully it's a way off yet - I do get a bit freaked out.

I'm scared of flying and had recently was on a flight and some turbulence hit the plane. Looking back now, it seems it was nothing out of the ordinary as the flight crew were going about their business serving drinks etc. I was petrified though.

I guess in a way that's the closest I'd probably feel to something like those in Columbine felt - I know now that I was probably 99.999% safer than those in the library but that fear of your life being out of your own hands for a time really is horrible.

Again, I know my mild turbulane experience is nothing compared to seeing two gun-wielding maniacs in front of you shooting people, but that's one of very few times I guess I imagined what it's like to think you are about to stare death in the face.

Yes, it has sunk in for me , many times.
It sometimes hits me at other times I don't expect.

What the victims went through is terrible and very sad and maybe I'm read too much true crime but I would rather be shot to death than die in some of the other horrific ways I've read about.
People have been burned alive, tortured to death, cut into pieces, literally beaten to death, drowned and so on.
I'm not trying to downplay the killings by saying that. It's my honest opinion.

PaintItBlack wrote:

Yes, it has sunk in for me , many times.
It sometimes hits me at other times I don't expect.

What the victims went through is terrible and very sad and maybe I'm read too much true crime but I would rather be shot to death than die in some of the other horrific ways I've read about.
People have been burned alive, tortured to death, cut into pieces, literally beaten to death, drowned and so on.
I'm not trying to downplay the killings by saying that. It's my honest opinion.

I completely understand where you're coming from with this. As you may guess, I am an avid supporter of LGBT rights and after reading about Matt Shepard and knowing what he went through - tied to a fence and beaten with the butt of a gun until his brain was exposed, then dying days later in the hospital - getting shot almost sounds serene by comparison.

I'm glad.
I was afraid that some might think I was trying to downplay the terribleness of the deaths.
I think I've just read way too much true crime in the past and have heard so many stories of agonizing deaths that have stayed with me.
I know a lot of people rank E &D as among the most evil people to ever walk the face of the earth and I know to some of the loved ones and friends of the victims, they probably are.
But I think that many people think that way because this is a fairly recent tragedy.
It is not one of those tragedies where even a lot of people born after it happened are dead.
Compared to many of the people who have lived in time, E &D don't even make a tiny blip on the evil scale IMO.

WendlaBergman wrote:

PaintItBlack wrote:

Yes, it has sunk in for me , many times.
It sometimes hits me at other times I don't expect.

What the victims went through is terrible and very sad and maybe I'm read too much true crime but I would rather be shot to death than die in some of the other horrific ways I've read about.
People have been burned alive, tortured to death, cut into pieces, literally beaten to death, drowned and so on.
I'm not trying to downplay the killings by saying that. It's my honest opinion.

I completely understand where you're coming from with this. As you may guess, I am an avid supporter of LGBT rights and after reading about Matt Shepard and knowing what he went through - tied to a fence and beaten with the butt of a gun until his brain was exposed, then dying days later in the hospital - getting shot almost sounds serene by comparison.

I don't believe Eric and Dylan are evil. Their actions were. I do not believe people are evil; actions are.

I often think this way too.
I also believe that a lot of times a spiritual evil comes through people and pushes them over the edge into committing evil acts when they might not have ever done it on their own.

WendlaBergman wrote:

I don't believe Eric and Dylan are evil. Their actions were. I do not believe people are evil; actions are.

I remember the first time I watched the cafeteria footage all the way through.
It was just insane to see it go from an average run of the mill day to a full on massacre.
Though you don't see anyone killed on the footage it is still hard to watch

I specially remember one part of the footage right before Dylan throws the Molotov cocktail at the bomb,
Dylan is walking around and you can see a student hiding under a table and Dylan is
right in his line of sight. I felt so much fear come over me watching that
It really shook me up. I imagined what it must have been like to be that student
and it really hit home for me when I saw that.