Column: In the wake of yet another school shooting, I fear young people will give up on our willingness to protect them

The Aug. 30 edition of the Daily Tar Heel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s student newspaper, was supposed to be devoted to the upcoming football season. The first game would be just days away. They would play South Carolina at home in prime time. Hard to imagine a bigger story.

Then an armed suspect walked up to associate professor Zijie Yan on Aug. 28 and shot him dead. The campus was sent into lockdown and thousands upon thousands of students, faculty and staff — and the people who love them — were sent reeling toward an all-too-familiar cycle of dread and fear.

Editor Emmy Martin quickly switched gears.

“As soon as I got out of lockdown — I was in a campus building a couple buildings over from where the shooting occurred — I walked straight to the newsroom and sat down with my staff,” Martin told PBS reporter Amna Nawaz in an interview two days later.

“At first, we didn't know what the cover would be,” Martin continued. “Honestly, at first, we thought just a blank front page. There's no words after such a traumatic event for students. But then, that evening I went home, was laying in bed looking at all the text messages that I personally had received while I was sheltering in place, and also looking at Instagram, and seeing so many UNC students post texts that they received, or that they sent to friends who were also in lockdown.”

Are you safe?

Where are you?

Are you alone?

Hey — come on sweetheart — I need to hear from you.

I love you.

My texts won’t go through.

Safe? Yes you?

I wish I could just come get you. Don’t stop texting me.

“And so that's when I knew that had to be our cover,” Martin said.

The cover, if you haven’t seen it, is a gut punch. The texts take up the entire page, all capital letters, mostly black, some red, in font that gets increasingly smaller as it descends to the bottom of the page. Like an eye chart, but to check if your country is insane.

Ours is.

Exhibit A: Martin saw this coming.

“Before I became editor in chief, it was something I thought of,” she told PBS. “‘What if there is a shooting on UNC's campus? How will I respond?’ And it is, in a way, sad that I had to think that. And I know other editors at other student newspapers who have had to cover active shooting situations on their campus.”

They’re tasked with fact-checking and narrating and chronicling what just happened. They’re tasked with writing the first draft of history. They’re tasked with shelving their own trauma to get their jobs done. Or tapping into their own trauma to empathize with the witnesses. Or writing about their own trauma because they are, also, witnesses.

They’re tasked with graduating from college and inheriting this world and nudging it, coaxing it, shoving it, maybe, toward a better way.

But first they have to not give up.

I’m begging them not to give up.

Anyone who’s been in a dysfunctional relationship knows what it’s like to eventually detach. You try and try and try and then you just … don’t. You stop offering your trauma as evidence. You stop opening up your wounds and asking for help with their healing. You start to feel your pain landing like a performance and you decide the show is over.

That’s my fear. In addition to one of my kids being shot at school (or at a concert or a party or a movie theater or a grocery store or a baseball game or a church service or on a sidewalk), my fear is that we will give up trying to prevent it.

I fear young people will give up on our ability, our willingness to prevent it. That we — the people who are old enough to vote, old enough to run for office, old enough to hold office, old enough to lobby for things we value, old enough to donate money to things we cherish — will seem incapable or uninterested in changing.

And the people who are counting on us will detach — on a topic that none of us, not one single one of us, should detach from.

“It feels like it was meant to send a message,” Nawaz, the PBS reporter said to Martin. “Was it? What's that message?”

Martin replied:

“I think we wanted to create a historical record of what happened on Monday, August 28, on UNC's campus, but we also wanted to create something that kind of gathered the full experience of that day and how UNC students felt on that day.

“Furthermore,” she continued, “those text messages are messages that anybody who has lived through an active shooter situation, that they have received. And so, in a way, yes, this is a cover that is so personal to UNC students. But it's also a cover that way too many people across the nation can connect with. And I think, in a way, if people read it that way and read it as a message, I think that's also true.”

We can’t let that message fall on deaf ears. We owe our children — and ourselves — better. We have to keep earning their belief in us, and then we have to live up to it.

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