Theo Wilson – TRANSCRIPT
“People will never know how far a little kindness can go,” Rachel Joy Scott. On the day that Hitler would have turned 110, two gunmen ignited Columbine High School like birthday candles to his sadistic legacy.
Rachel Scott was the first flame extinguished. Her first breath was sun-charged Colorado oxygen just 55 days after mine was. Her last, a choking exhale facing at the Rockies, but Rachel’s diaries will one day dwarf that horizon. People ask me, “What’s in that air in Colorado?” and I’d tell them, “Shoot off a gun in a room full of propane gas, by the time you see the flame, it’s too late.” Thus, the resulting inferno at the heart of this nation post-Columbine revealed the chemical properties of hate.
See, it can be in the air, all around you, until an incident ignites it, but instead of alive, some victims just end up too late, and God is always on time, they say. Some would argue, “Yeah, just two steps behind the buckshot.” Sarcasm, stumbling from the rightful barrel of a skeptic’s mouth, the hand of tragedy stroking their ego, they ask, “How can you have faith in the invisible?” As if we don’t rely on things unseen every day. Show me the color of your Wi-Fi signal, the radio wave that dance songs through your flesh, leaving no exit wound. The repulsive charge in your skin’s electrons is the reason why you’ve never actually touched anything in your life.
So find me a liar more persistent than your five physical senses, that’s only five wavelengths broadcasted on the ocean of possible. With different organs your whole universe would change. A bee’s eyes would turn your garden into an infrared orchestra, the way a bat’s sonar turns the night into an aerial buffet, and I have seen 50-ton jets held aloft by nothing, and thus, everyone- on-board’s prayers that day I would argue, and so would Rachel’s family, that nothing is more real than that which can’t be seen, and you never believe it until it hits you.