Story of Self by Kaitlyn Justice

Gun violence is a very real and very serious issue. This is a fact that I have never had the privilege to ignore. I started school at 4 years old, and for as long as I can remember I have had to take part in school shooting drills. I have never been unaware that I could go to school one day and never return. Perhaps I was not as aware of it at 4 years old. Maybe such a thought hadn’t really stuck with me at 5 or 6 either. I do know that I knew it at those ages, though. They taught it to me. They taught me to hide in a corner in a darkened classroom. They taught me code words and which furniture was heaviest. By the time I was 12, I knew exactly which teachers would die for me. I knew exactly which of my classmates were bravest. I knew every object in every room and how best to move it in front of the door. I could open the classroom windows with my eyes closed. I knew where the baseball bats were, and which object would break glass if thrown hard enough. I had all of this information stored away, and I never knew when exactly I might need it, only that there was a very real possibility that I would. By the time I was in high school, I had hundreds of escape plans memorized. Some I would never use, as I was no longer in elementary or middle school. Some were brand new. I had new code words, new phrases, dozens of new teachers with different hiding places, and the new exciting prospect of being in a classroom with no windows. I had at least five escape plans for every section of the school. I knew which teachers would die for me, because they told me. They told me because by the time I was in high school, it seemed like there was a new school shooting in the news every week. I knew which teachers knew how to use a gun. I knew which teacher used to be in the military, and which ones had kids at home, and exactly why they hated being in the inner rooms with no windows. I knew every detail of the trainings the faculty partook in to learn how to keep us safe. I was intimately aware of how very real the danger was, because every single day it seemed like we were all holding our breath. Then Parkland happened, and we really were. We spent every day wondering if we were next, or if we’d get a news alert midway through the day reporting from a different school. Some days no one would come to school because some kid decided to threaten to bring a gun via SnapChat. Some days they’d threaten and we’d show up anyway. I’ve spent entire school days looking over my shoulder. A girl threatened to kill us all one day and she had to be escorted around the school. Every time she turned the corner with a principal not far behind, the room would fall silent. Someone dropped their books and it rang out like a gunshot. One of the football players was under the lunch table before the sound had even faded. This was our reality. We were always waiting. We didn’t ask ourselves if it would happen to us. We asked when. I spent most of my senior year having nightmares. It was always the same. It started at breakfast. I was sitting at my usual table with my friends. Mr. Taylor was standing by the door with the newly hired policeman with his shiny black gun strapped to his hip. The lunch ladies were handing out biscuits. I would be talking, laughing, and then look up to see someone climb onto one of the tables. Before anyone else could notice, the figure would shoot Mr. Taylor and then the policeman. In the time it took for them to fall, blood all over the blue school doors, the figure would then shoot Trey from the football team just as he went to stand. Trey would fall between my table and the one beside it. Bryce would step in front of his twin sister, and he would die for it. Sometime between then and the death of several more kids I had known nearly all of my life, I would make it outside. The world would be gray. I’d wake up crying. Every morning afterwards, I’d walk into breakfast. Mr. Taylor would be there standing beside the policeman. I wouldn’t eat the biscuits. I’d see someone move towards a table, and lose my breath. Trey would walk past me, or say something particularly loud, and it would make me feel sick. I didn’t look Bryce in the eye for the rest of the year. At least five of my friends told me they had experienced something similar. I had more panic attacks in one year than I had in the last three combined. One of the freshmen asked me if I thought she was going to die before she graduated. Half of my teachers wanted guns and the other half wanted gun control. Some of them cried and one of them assured us that they loved us all enough to die for us. All of my escape plans had escape plans. Every single door in the gym was always open when we walked in, and I watched every day as the same boy shut each one before class would end. They started locking the front doors of the school. The policeman had his own office on the second floor. I never heard him speak. For years, gun violence was a silent presence in my life. School shootings were whispers. Then all at once those whispers turned to shouts, and it clouded every aspect of my school experience. Having the police there made it worse. It gave validation to the whispers, transformed them into screams. Every person I spoke to about it said knowing that an armed officer was there did not make them feel safe. More than a few of them told me it made the possible feel like the inevita-

ble. School is supposed to be safe. When we prioritize guns over children, school is no longer a safe learning environment. It’s a place of trauma. It feels as though you’re walking over landmines. When is it going to get me? Is this step, this day, going to be my last? The last time I’ll ever see my friends? The last time the kid that sits across from me in Algebra will ever laugh at the teacher’s jokes? The last time that she’ll ever ask me for help on the homework? Is this the last time we’ll all be together and in one piece? Was that a locker slamming or a gunshot? Put the chair in front of the door just in case. Call down to the principal’s office. Make sure your phones are on silent, and please whisper. Keep your heads down while I call the office. It’s okay, everyone, Mr. Taylor says it’s all clear. Return to your seats. Here’s a tissue, go wash your face. Take a deep breath and turn to page 84. Make sure to knock and state your name when you come back from the bathroom so we can unlock the door. No one ever said, “Thankfully, we have an armed police officer on campus. He’ll take care of the threat.” We all assumed there was a threat and responded in a trained fashion. That, in itself, is horrifying. It would be more than horrifying to watch a child grow up with an armed officer in their school, faced with that level of unease every single day for 12 years or more, while teacher’s barely make enough money to justify risking their lives for the rights of a gun. Everything I’ve experienced would be made worse by adding in an armed officer. It was worse when it happened in my senior year, and I can barely stand to imagine how it would feel to grow up with an officer in school from the very first day. How do you explain that to a child? How would they be expected to react? What kind of harm does that present to them, both in that present tense and in the future? Consider the long term effects. I can still remember the exact color dream-Trey was wearing when he died in my nightmares. I don’t remember what subjects were covered in my US history class that year. What does that kind of awareness look like for a child? “It is hard to imagine KFTC over the past 15 years without Mary Love. She has made herself of service, indispensable, and beloved.

Mary grew up in East Tennessee. And while she lives in Oldham County and is active in the Jefferson County KFTC chapter, she is devoted to eastern Kentucky and the struggles to protect the land, water, and people of Central Appalachia.

The list of Mary’s leadership roles within KFTC is extensive and exhausting, and it doesn’t begin to include her many other commitments through her church, as a poll worker, and as a devoted great Aunt.

Mary has been among the most consistent and active members of KFTC’s Land Reform Committee and NET Committee, which together guide KFTC’s work on stopping harmful and polluting practices and building a new, just, and sustainable economy. She serves on her chapter’s Air Quality Team, and on KFTC’s Leadership Development Committee, Steering Committee, Executive Committee, and the board of KFTC’s tax-exempt sister organization, Kentucky Coalition.

Mary has also represented KFTC on the board of the Alliance for Appalachia, and on the coordinating committees of the Kentucky Sustainable Energy Alliance and a national network that focuses on Extreme Energy Extraction. She has been a spokesperson and outstanding grassroots lobbyist in campaigns for clean energy, against mountaintop removal mining, and against payday lending.

But none of that long list begins to tell the story of how diligently and effectively she works.

Mary is the person you most want by your side if you are hosting a conference and desperately need a 40 foot extension cord, or a WiFi hotspot, or a special adaptor to connect your computer to the projector. Her car is like Mary Poppins’s bag, loaded with practical tech gadgets for every occasion.

For the last 15 years, Mary has been a road warrior and a dedicated people connector. She connects people who should know each other and ought to be working together. She connects the dots between all of our issues, helping people see how voting rights, just transition, water pollution, and economic exploitation are all connected. And she connects us all by building bridges and common purpose among our members from Louisville, eastern Kentucky, and around the Commonwealth.