Recently, we suffered a devastating national tragedy in Florida, where a disturbed young man carried out an all too familiar act of violence aimed at helpless and innocent school children. Watching this horrific nightmare unfold live on TV, my heart sunk. I stayed glued to the reporting along with the rest of the country as the police took control of the situation, meanwhile, the total number of victims continued increasing as they began to analyze the hellish scene they finally put an end to.
While some people took this opportunity to bang some kind of political drum, most of us felt a numb frustration start to take control of our consciousness. We watched the cell phone videos taken by children in classrooms hiding under their desks as gunshots shattered the anxious silence. The screams of the students accompanied the relentless gunfire, reaching a sickening crescendo of death and terror. We watched as they came streaming out of the school with their hands up, their terrified eyes searching desperately for direction from the police or the familiar face of a parent they thought they may never see again.
You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.
-Leo Tolstoy
This scenario has been covered from all angles during the increasingly frequent mass shootings of the past decade, and the political debates around this are as frustratingly immoveable as the sword in the stone of Disney lore.
The left demands an undefined change in gun regulations that likely wouldn’t have stopped the incident in question, and the right simply throws their hands up and lets the most extreme elements of their party drive a narrative that restricting people from owning rocket launchers and anti-aircraft guns is an affront to our freedom as Americans. Both parties provide some ambiguous talking points about mental health they have no intentions of acting on, and then we all move on in a few weeks to the latest news story that dominates our psyches.
As I was watching this predictable back and forth play out for the third time in the last six months, something caught my eye and ended the screaming at the sky levels of frustration that had previously enveloped my thoughts.
The story of Aaron Feis quickly emerged as a source of hope in one of the bleakest situations we have seen this year. Feis, who was the assistant football coach and also helped with school security, put the lives of the students ahead of his own. As the shooter was heartlessly mowing down children, he consciously used his own body to shield them from the incoming hail of bullets, paying the ultimate price for his selfless actions. He was a well-respected and loved figure at the school, who was entrusted by the parents of those students to do what was best for them. He lived up to the trust they placed in him, at the expense of everything else. He cared about those students more than his own life, his own dreams, and his own family.
He wasn’t the only one to give or risk his life for others that day. Scott Beigel, a geography teacher at the school, lost his life when he unlocked his classroom door to help more students, exposing himself to fatal gunfire in the process. Some of the students themselves were also taking action to save others, such as the JROTC members who took an immediate leadership role, funneling students to safety and covering them with protective Kevlar they used for training.
Aaron Feis
Scott Beigel
These stories, along with a multitude of other everyday heroes who stepped up to save others that day, are the rays of sunshine breaking through the dark angry clouds that have engulfed our country. They are the inspiration we can find in a situation typically devoid of meaning, answers, and hope. They set an example of courage, honor, integrity, commitment to others, and kindness that reminds us the world isn’t just full of monsters and enemies. The world is also full of people who care, who have a purpose they think is worth dying for, and who are willing to act when the moment of truth arrives.
When tragedy inevitably strikes again, and the frustration begins to overtake us once more, we would do well to remember the sacrifices made by the best among us. Instead of looking at the shooters face for weeks on end, we should focus on the examples set by those that showed courage in the face of danger. We have something poisoning who we are as a society if the increasing frequency of these shootings is any indication. While gun laws may be a simple-sounding solution, these situations didn’t occur at anywhere near this rate in the past.
As a society, we have to rediscover the heroes among us, we need to elevate traits we find honorable, and we must strive to emulate the character of those who place the lives of others above their own. Will that solve the problem at hand? Probably not right away, but by identifying what good looks like once again, we will have a bar of character worth measuring ourselves against. Isolation and a lack of purpose seem to be the most common characteristics of mass shooters, and that’s an enemy we are all familiar with. If we are willing to attack those enemies with abandon, armed with newly rediscovered examples of what it means to care for one another, maybe we can connect with the hopelessly disconnected, and repair what is broken inside both them and ourselves. Only then will we be in a position to find the answers to a problem that is devastating our country one massacre at a time.