We are Marysville Pilchuck

We are Columbine. We are Virginia Tech. We are Fort Hood. We are Aurora. We are Sandy Hook. We are the Washington Navy Yard. We are Seattle Pacific University. We are Ottawa.

Now, we are Marysville Pilchuck High School.

Those simple words are meant as sincere statements of solidarity with communities left reeling by mass shootings. But contained in those few words is the realization that it could happen to us, to our children, to our neighbors, friends and co-workers and the fear that we can’t know where or when it will happen next.

It happened here. We were next.

The Oso landslide this March was a different kind of tragedy, but it is one that provides us guidance for our response to the Marysville Pilchuck shooting. The residents of the Stillaguamish Valley communities of Darrington, Oso and Arlington came together to meet each other’s physical, financial and emotional needs, as did the rest of Snohomish County and Washington state.

Again, we will come together to comfort and console the students, teachers and staff and their families who were subjected to an act of unfathomable violence. We can allow families the space they need to grieve, provide our condolences and offer a receptive ear when they are ready to talk. We can offer emotional support and reassurance to the injured and to those emotionally scarred by Friday’s events.

For many, this is how wounds began to heal after the Oso slide. It will be how the Greater Marysville community heals.

In the coming days there will be renewed calls for answers, for solutions to our epidemic of gun violence. With emotions still raw, the discussion will have to wait. But the answer will demand action from each of us in the community, as a community, as a state and as a nation.

Each of us will have to do more than shrug our shoulders in resignation and cross our fingers in hope that it won’t happen to us.

It has now happened to us.

We are Marysville Pilchuck High School.