If any of you were allowed to not notice, April 20 was the one-year anniversary of the Columbine High shootings that claimed 15 young lives, and the day before was the five-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombings. These two tragic events were very dark days in the history of this nation indeed. Suddenly it became more apparent than ever that in the work place, in the institutions where young people are educated, in the buildings that house federal and state governmental authorities and even in our own homes, horrible acts of terror born of a variety of societal and political improprieties as interpreted by an individual who is embittered or delusional or feeling maligned or cheated by life, can suddenly take shape and explode in acts of unthinkable violence. Numerous innocent individuals can lose their lives in a wave of misguided rage, as these events perfectly exemplified, at any time, all of a sudden, with astonishing technical expertise and shocking methodical attentiveness, and right under the noses of people who thought nothing out of the ordinary was brewing. It's been one hard year since the day when not a single member of the student body even thought of humming the song, "School's Out" by Alice Cooper, and boy was it ever out.

In the year that followed the media poked, prodded, and squeezed every possible angle of coverage out of the story, charting the difficult healing period, focusing on specific students who were crippled for life in the shooting and bravely struggling with their new handicap, following a few of the noble students on a mission to war torn Bosnia where their experience would enable them to reach out to young people who lived through a Columbine-like tragedy every day, Country and Gospel artists writing songs about the tragedy or more specifically about the one girl who was shot for admitting her belief in God, the casual references to the event every time another student with a gun incident occurred anytime ever (and predictably there was a handful of such incidents, one involving a six year old boy shooting a six year old girl, like a Muppet baby Columbine), how the event forcefully established the issue of Gun Control as a keypoint in the presidential primaries, the arguably assisted suicide of one of the victim's who was left paraplegic and subsequently alone with a gun just purchased by her mother, the two nerdy brothers who wrote a musical tribute with their dad to be performed at the memorial service (and they think it might get them dates for the first time ever), the lawsuits being brought against the police by nine of the victim's families, one suit alleging that bullets fired by the police are the bullets that killed their son, the anticipation over which celebrity Kathy Lee Gifford is singing a self-penned duet with about the tragedy a year later, what Rosie O'Donnell thinks about it all, the objection by the parents over the surveillance camera footage from inside the school being released to major magazines before it was released to them and other such nit-picking power issues many of the victim's parents addressed fervently enough for yet another appearance on the Today show with Matt and Katie, watching the return of the student body to Columbine for the first time, all smiles and fresh new Columbine High School T-shirts, listening to the ambitious student heading the committee to create a permanent monument to those who lost their lives, and on and on and on. I bet I could find a pie graph illustrating the daily drop in attendance as compared to the happier pre-bloodbath Columbine attendance records somewhere online. I even heard that the 5 science department teachers are now working on a book together, so no doubt we'll be hearing from the English Department, the Phys Ed department, the Math Department, maybe even a musical interpretation from the Jazz Lab. I bet Andrew Lloyd Weber is already working on an epic touring Broadway musical extravaganza. I see drill team angels with flag team wings ascending to heaven with red sequin blood ribbons trailing behind.

Recalling the first day of school, A Return To Columbine footage on the news, I couldn't help but think about certain scenes from one of my favorite movies ever, Heathers. Everyone was wearing crisp clean white school T-shirts with Columbine emblazoned across the backs, and the kids all seemed to be exuding an extra helping of happiness and positivity, not unlike the scene from Heathers in the cafeteria after the third apparent suicide and the hippie sensitivity damaged teacher is leading some retarded vacuous feel-the-love, choose life pow-wow and the kids are wearing T-shirts that say "Suicide-Don't Do It" and Veronica, the popular girl who has been responsible for the "Suicides" of her classmates walks in and rolls her eyes over the emotional outpouring of this superficial response, feeling more disdain for them than remorse for committing cold blooded murder. This really got me thinking about the Kids at Columbine. I began to wonder if any one of them had thought of printing up a different shirt than their official school one, perhaps something like a blood splattered "I survived the Columbine Massacre" or "My sister went to Columbine for her senior year and all I got was this bloody shirt!" or "I Don't believe in God (not)"or "I still Don't Like Mondays." It seems there would have to be someone there who wasn't really so traumatized by the event, some emotionally adroit and existential foreign exchange student unscathed by the dramatics and horror, just continued reading his copy of The Stranger by Camus, noting a singular drop of blood on one page.

Who is the media trying to kid with all this pretty pretty healing stuff they focus on and all this God stuff as if the church and school were never seperated? In the entire student body you know there had to be a few people who actually liked this dark day in the history of American education. Oh spare me the shock-horror reaction to that statement! You know it's true. Think High School-how many people in your class did you really truly like? How many perhaps tortured you in some nightmarish social way for as long as an entire school year during junior high, giving you plenty of time to dream of their painful demise? And what if by chance three or four of those people were shot point blank and killed when a pair of students with an arsenal decide it's Career Day and proceed to go Postal on the student body -then of course themselves? Would you break down like you had lost your dearest friends and then head a committee to raise funds for a permanent memorial or would you maybe saunter off for a smoke under the bleachers humming "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun"? I applaud the first Columbine student who dares to play a prank with stage blood or firecrackers during a pep assembly.

I dare the marching band to learn "I Don't Like Mondays," and play it at halftime. The media is feeding America with "Columbine The Healing" like a slow drip IV antibiotic, it goes on and on and(sob) on. It's been a year kids-shouldn't you all be burying your heads in your monitors and preparing for a dot.com career that pays big enough money to afford a home security system? It is clearly time to move on-victims as well as spectators. There's always something new to attach all this focus on, for instance there's this little boy from Cuba who floated up on an inner tube on thanksgiving day in Florida, kind of like The Baby Moses.and you'll never believe the suffering.oh gotta go-he's on right now!