I’m still good friends with the girl I took to my senior prom, so I was worried when I heard there’d been a shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, which her younger son attends.  I was relieved when I saw her message in my Facebook feed saying he was all right.  (And I was happy that Facebook deemed this important enough to promote above cat videos and Zimbo quizzes.)

Since Columbine I’ve tried to get my head around the difference between being a teenager in the 70s and in the millennium.  It can’t be that being a teen is a rough time; it’s always been a rough time.  Most of us aren’t at all what we want to be or where we want to be then.  As my girlfriend said when we talked, most have said we wish we could be 25 again, but no one wants a second shot at being 14.  We all know it’s awful.  As an under-sized, near-sighted gay kid, I definitely remember.

Two things baffle me about Jaylen Fryberg and all the other kids like him.

First, my worst memories of school are from before I got to high school.  For me middle school was the horror.  High school was a breeze by comparison.  In fact, I can still remember the moment when I was walking up to good old Roosevelt High and thought, “These people aren’t jerks anymore.  This is going to be OK.”  I don’t think my classmates or I were unusual; we’d all probably just grown up a little bit.  Whatever the reason, life got a lot easier from there on.

Second, I don’t know when kids started thinking that someone had to die to alleviate their pain or anger.  Even in my darkest 7^th– or 8^th-grade moments, I never wanted anyone dead – least of all myself.  Again, little, blind fag.  I had some very dark times.  I dreamed about telling them all off.  I dreamed about being fabulously successful and giving them all a big lifetime raspberry.  I never thought about going into my parent’s closet, taking one of my father’s shotguns and a box of ammo and blasting my way through the Roosevelt cafeteria.

So what’s different?  What makes this an end a kid would go for?  Violence on TV and in the movies?  Too simple.  I grew up watching the Road Runner give it to Wiley Coyote every weekend, shootouts in Laramie, and Laredo and Virginia City all week, and James Bond doing away with baddies in a hundred incendiary ways when I went to the movies.  If that were the key, kids would have been blowing each other up and away for the past 70 years.

Somehow we’ve come to a point where kids don’t know or care that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.  I don’t know why that is, but I hope we can pull ourselves back from the precipice.