My parent’s moved from Chicago to Colorado when I was 6 years old.  Moving to the location where Katherine Lee Bates wrote America the Beautiful seemed like a great place to raise children in a bubble of safety and security.  But the bubble burst in 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School.

The Columbine Tragedy is one of my first memories.  It seems like a classroom should feel like one of the safest places in the world.  But since that day, there is always an underlying current of doubt.  Its not that we are scared, but we are aware that there is always a possibility that a psychopath could come into our school and try to kill us.

Then, two years later, when I was  just eight years old, we watched as terrorists intentionally crashed two commercial airliners into the Twin Towers on September 11th.  We watched thousands of innocent Americans die, for no other reason than they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  This only heightened our feelings of vulnerability.

My brother is four years younger than me, he doesn’t have memories of these events.  They are like a history lesson to him.  I think there is a difference in how we grew up.  Once you know evil firsthand, you can’t “un-know” it.  Instead, my friends and I have found ways to cope with that knowledge and the knowledge that we will never really be safe.

Does that knowledge change my generation?  It definitely changed how we were raised.  Our parents gave us less freedom.  Our schools have a zero tolerance policy.  We were counseled on how to handle unthinkable situations.  We were given cell phones, not for convenience but for our safety.  I think we also live with the certainty that life can end at any time.  My peer group is more driven to make a difference.  We search for meaning.