Your story is pretty similar to mine, but I can't disagree more with your conclusions. I too lived near Columbine and went to a high school nearby. My brother was visiting the school in preparation to transfer there the day before the shooting, and I had been there at prom with the girl I was dating the weekend before. The girl I was dating, the girl my brother was dating, and our best friends all were there when the shooting happened.

It's disingenuous of you to describe things the way you did. To describe the community's response as lip service is doing an extreme disservice to damn near everyone living in the area at the time. Never before or since in my life have I ever experienced the type of generosity and genuine attempts at providing support and guidance as I did in the weeks and months after the shooting, and I didn't even go to the school. The community at large did so much to help.

Walking down Bowles from the theater to Columbine with thousands of people in the community at my side was one of the defining moments in my young life. A great evil had been done, and the mood was appropriately somber, but there was an air of defiance that was absolutely tangible then, and remained so for years after-- an air that we were determined to overcome this as a community. It was the first time I recall having such a clear understanding of the contrast in both the depths of our evil and the heights of our love.

That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what the good the community did, nor what changed in my life over the next weeks and months and years. My views on the causes and effects have changed. The people I knew that were directly involved all changed, some in ways that were very closely related to the trauma of that day. To imply nothing changed and that those involved did nothing more than pay lip service to the tragedy before moving on is, quite frankly, an insult, and one that I can not let pass.