A Local Perspective on a National Issue

By ZACHARY GARAI | Contributing Writer

Pacific Palisades Democratic Club Student Representative Zachary Garai, a student at Palisades Charter High School, was inspired to write the following after attending a screening of “Newton,” a film created by Kim Snyder who spent three years documenting the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The post-movie discussion featured a panel that included high school students and the father of a college student who was killed at the UCSB shooting.

It was midmorning on May 18. My phone buzzed; I checked it, seeing a notification about a shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas. Three months and four days after Parkland, tragedy struck once more.

I grappled with the fact that those three months of protest had seemingly been for naught, as yet another shooting had taken place. Lives were lost. The very nature of existence was irreparably altered for everyone in that small town.

But the most terrifying aspect of all this isn’t that the massacre occurred. It’s that this is just one event among countless others, trivialized to an extent by the frequency of these massacres.

These tragedies—Santa Fe, Parkland, Sandy Hook and countless others—aren’t isolated events, but flare-ups of the gun violence epidemic, and their impact is being felt across the nation.

From walkouts to the “March For Our Lives,” demonstrations across the country are drawing the gun violence issue into the public consciousness to a greater extent than before.

As the new student representative to the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club, I have the privilege of organizing the students who will push for the change we must see in this violent and angry world.

Gun violence, and school shootings in particular, often seem like a far-off abstraction. These mindless tragedies take place at high schools and universities in Virginia, in Texas, in Florida and in Colorado, but not here. Thus, it’s almost impossible to comprehend what these events do to the victims, to their families and to the communities around them.

The June 16 showing of the documentary “Newton” provided an opportunity to see the real cost of these tragedies. By understanding, at least to some small extent, the reality of life after these massacres, the need to take action becomes apparent.

The film was shown at Palisades Charter High School, juxtaposed beside the fences recently thrown up around the high school to protect students and faculty.

Though I was expecting to walk away with some greater measure of empathy than I had walking in and I expected the film to draw the issue closer, to show the human cost of tragedy, I wasn’t prepared for the effect the 90-some-odd-minute film had on me.

The scope of the tragedy, as with so many others, made it impossible for me to contemplate the impact of the event. But the film focused more on the details, on how life changed, truly showing how devastating the senseless act of one person can be for an entire community. Everybody in that town was affected by the shooting. It’s the kind of occurrence that cannot be forgotten, one that left its mark on every part of that town.

And yet, here I am, in this bubble of security. Despite these horrific events, always on the news, I have yet to be scared. That’s worrisome—perhaps I have accepted this, normalized it.

Or maybe, on some level, I realize that these random outbursts of violence can happen to anyone at anytime, and that there’s no point in fretting over something so wholly outside of my control.

It all seems so distant, but (as the movie so clearly demonstrated) reality can be brought to a grinding halt in an instant. For every week that goes by where my life is characterized by the ordinary, it seems that a violent act is carried out in a school, a park, a street, a home, somewhere else.

I wish there was an easy answer. I wish the Second Amendment was less opaque and kept with the times as the rest of the Constitution has. Before substantive progress can be made, we first have to listen—and “Newton” gives us that opportunity.