Routines are life. Repetition is life, at least for most of us. The days pass at a rate or normalcy we become accustomed to and regardless of how much we despise such a routine and unvaried life we continue to follow it. In simple terms, it is hard to break free.

February 14, 2018 2:30PM

This is a time when a routine fell to pieces. Students attending high school, whose main concern should be the next up coming test and who they are going to prom or ball with, had to turn to their friends and wonder if they would ever walk out of the school again. If they would ever see their parents again, their siblings, their friends down the hall in another classroom. Would they graduate? Would they be doctors and lawyers and nurses and business owners and would they find love? Would they travel and would they have children, and would they be able to sit in a rocking chair at eighty years old and look back with fond memories at the life they lived? Should they have talked to that girl or boy they had a crush on just last year? Would it even matter now?

For seventeen students, all of that would matter, because for them, none of it will happen. They were not gunned down at a drug deal, they did not have the wrong friends, they were not in the wrong place at the wrong time; they went to school that morning. Three thousand children went to school that morning. Seventeen did not return home.

That is a routine broken in all the wrong ways. That is a life changed in such a way that is irreparable.

And I have to sit here and read about the “mental history” of a piece of shit who could not fathom his own life so he took a seventeen others with him. I have to be subjected to articles discussing how depression and anxiety could cause such a massacre, not just this time, but every time. The experts say three-hundred and fifty million people in this world live with depression at one point or another. I would say it is likely even higher, as I have never mentioned one word of my struggle to anyone. I have never been diagnosed. But I know what depression is and I know what it is not.

I have never seen a nineteen year old man described as an orphan when his mother died just three months ago. 

Is it because he is white? Is it because the media cannot possibly have an article, in the twenty -first century, that does not contain speculation as to why something happened? “Mental Illness.” “Orphan.” “Rough childhood.” These are not explanations, these are not excuses. These are speculations and they are untrue. These are not reasons. I would like to read a news “report” that contains simply information. What happened and where it happened and maybe how it happened and who did it and who suffered as a result if they are willing to share their suffering with the world. Why it happened does not belong there , and for one simple reason. We do not know the answer.

It is a lack of value placed on human life. My opinion, is that it is a result of social media and how counterfeit the lives portrayed really are. I could go on, but I do not want to, I am too angry.

I will save it for next time.