How the Story Changes by Krista Hanley

Photo by Sam Granillo

My good friend Sam Granillo is very brave. Very brave and very honest. He is a feeling person, the kind that looks you in the eye, the kind that tears up at hard moments, the kind that gives amazing hugs. Everyone needs a friend like that, and I'm lucky to have had Sam in my life for this long.

Due to this relationship, and due to Sam being an outstanding spokesperson for Columbine, I'd like the world to watch the Dateline episode that featured him on April 20, 2014. It is a new story of Columbine, and we need more stories and different stories. The link is here: The Road Home

I feel like what has come before was the media's broken-record recitation of events, injured, killed. The same mug-shot yearbook photos, the same overhead and across the street views of the school. There have been few stories about the rest of the community: including the students and faculty that were not physically injured, the ones that did not encounter the shooters, the ones that survived that day with only emotional scars. But those scars can be deep too. There can still be PTSD, even for those that got out of the school fairly quickly, or even those that were not even in the school that day.

What's different about Sam's story is that he's allowing himself to feel his way through it, not to get over it or push it aside. He's allowing himself to assimilate those events, to be changed by them.

Sam is an artist and a filmmaker, so he's looking at the world from different angles, like the photo looking up at an icicle that he shot last winter. It looks up at a dripping icicle with roofline and sun, and then roof and sun in miniature inside the drop of water about to fall off the end. There's blue sky and cold sun, and the solid ice becoming liquid.

So when he looks at Columbine, he's also looking at other events that reflect Columbine, piecing together school shootings through a lens of deep empathy and compassion. The big picture framing the little picture, the droplet inside. There are so many similarities to other shootings that we can support and learn from one another, and maybe we can even begin to bring about change together.

Here's a link to the website about the documentary Sam is making about Columbine: Columbine: Wounded Minds