Two Sides

One of my latest reads (along with a few of my friends) was 19 Minutes by Jodi Picoult. Overall, I am a fan of this author. She writes on some hard subjects & I absolutely love reading books that make you think, that make you experience real emotion instead of the surface emotion.

19 MInutes is about a boy who, after years of being picked on, walks into his high school & starts shooting. Not long after I started the book I read online that the mother of one of the shooters at Columbine was going to be writing an article in Oprah's magazine talking about her point of view. I kept meaning to get it when I would be out at WalMart or Target and just never did.

I finally picked it up this week and sat down to read the article. Its maybe 4 pages, as opposed to the 455 pages in the book, & I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I ended up being just that has the amount of similarities in the long book & the short article.

You always, always go straight to feeling for the victim & the victim's family. And how can you not?Suffering a tragedy like Columbine... as much as you felt that to your core as every other high school student in America, how much more did it hurt to be there? But how many of us consider the flip side? How many wonder how devastated the family of the shooter feels? Probably not very many. I can't imagine losing someone that way. To love someone so much & not see how much they hurt inside. To wake up one day to find that you have no explanation for the actions of someone you love & on top of that the whole world is looking at you like you did something wrong.

There are two sides to every story.