For the past couple of years, Eric had worked at the Environmental Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and part of his job was picking up the trash on campus that people threw away, sometimes during football games, and then sorting out the recyclable material from the rest. More than once, he’d contrasted the difference between reading or talking about environmental issues in class and having his hands dirtied by wading through what others had discarded. Early in our discussions, he’d said that one learned how to be socialized and how to compromise by living with others and rubbing up against the differences between people on a daily basis. One also learned something about environmentalism by sifting through garbage.
Sometimes he’d complained about the work because it was demanding and tiring, but he’d liked its physical nature and seeing the results of his labor. He’d had a tangible effect, even if it was a small one, on a global problem. He’d done something instead of just complained about it. He’d served a cause greater than himself.
The small things, or supposedly small ones, kept coming up and refusing to stay small. Time and again in our discussions about the Holmes case, our son made the same comment: “Talk to your kids. Just talk to them and listen to what they have to say. You may not like it, but you need to listen to what they’re thinking and experiencing. It all starts there. Everyone feels isolated now. Everyone feels that they don’t really live in a community anymore.”
One night at a dinner party, a very bright eighty-three-year-old woman asked us what book we were working on. We said the Holmes case, but with an emphasis on the cultural influences that had shaped him and his generation. After we spoke about this age group for a while, she asked, “Has your son ever felt needed?”
We told her about his work at the Environmental Center and about the late summer of 2013, when Boulder was hit by what meteorologists described as the kind of flood that might happen every eight hundred years. The house Eric was sharing with five other young men was inundated, the basement buried in water, and all of them spent days and nights scooping silt and water out of the house, salvaging whatever they could. The experience impacted Eric long after the water had receded; he’d felt needed in the middle of a deluge. A crisis wasn’t just something to be victimized by, but an opportunity to discover more of your own strength, your own ability to make decisions and act, and your own inner resources. You were stronger and more resilient than you’d realized. The flood was not a large event in the grand scale of life on earth, but the more we probed the causes and effects behind the mass-shooting phenomenon, the more we returned to the smaller things, the small connections between human beings, or what we commonly refer to as small.
One of those things was a doorway with Eric that opened up in larger ways as he got older. It had started in middle school when we’d hear him singing Beatles songs, or tunes by Bob Marley, or Neil Young’s “Old Man,” or Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On.” Like many parents of our generation, we were glad that the music of our era resonated with him. Then he began sharing the albums of contemporary artists like Green Day, Vampire Weekend, and others that had recorded material with both social and spiritual substance.
During his high school years, he’d continued our musical education, introducing us to hip hop and “sampling,” which often used snippets of the music we’d grown up listening to. Since both of us were passionate about music and over the years had been involved in the making of it, we’d found more common ground with our son, and Joyce began adding some of his music to her digital library. While it was common ground, it wasn’t always easy ground. Eric’s favorite artists were rap and hip-hop stars, usually from ghettos in Brooklyn or elsewhere. He was particularly interested in the alternative hip-hop that revolved around issues of social justice in America, also called “Conscious Hip-Hop.” This genre included New York artists like Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), Talib Kweli, Common, A Tribe Called Quest, and others—but the first difficulty with these artists for his parents came in trying to understand their language.
They used phrases and inflections that could be hard to grasp, especially for those well into middle age. This was a challenge, but if we were willing to sit down and listen closely to what they were saying or to read the lyrics Eric showed us online, we were surprised at what we found. The origins of hip-hop, like the origins of much of what we’d listened to in the 1960s, were rooted in social protest and the concepts of Afrocentricity and self-determination. There were striking similarities between the issues the Conscious Rappers were talking about (politics, racial and economic injustices) and what folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and others had done in the 1960s protest movements and before then. Only the form of the music was different now and the nuances of the English language. The convictions and the message were essentially the same: All of the artists were all interested in stopping abuses of power and spreading equality.
One afternoon when Eric was a senior in high school, the three of us were driving home from the mountains. He was in the back seat with headphones on, deep into his own music and thoughts. He looked up and asked if he could play a song through the car speaker. He put on the soundtrack of Cadillac Records with Mos Def performing a Chuck Berry song. It was the starting point for many more conversations about music and race.
Like Eric, Steve had grown up with a particular interest in black music: the blues of B. B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Etta James, among many others. These artists didn’t just introduce him to significant portions of African-American culture, but gave him a better understanding of black history and race relations in the United States. This was especially important for Steve, born in the 1950s in rural Kansas, when the civil rights movement was just beginning. Eric was now listening to a newer generation of black artists who were expanding his own consciousness on the subject of culture and race in America.
Music gave us insight into our son, into his peers whom he shared this music with, and into aspects of the current society that was producing these new artists. People his age had many of the same idealistic feelings we’d had when young—when our generation was striving for change and for making the United States “a more perfect union.” By not dismissing Eric’s music because it was challenging, we’d built another bridge.
The thing about America now, as opposed to when we were younger, was that you had to dig a little harder with everybody you met on the street or at a party or at work to find the shared dreams and desires. The sense of community was no longer as obvious, at least on the surface, but most people still had the same aspirations. And down below all of this was a deeper revelation: The government was no longer playing a parental role for us. It wasn’t going to fix everything. Society was changing too fast, and was far too influenced by new technology, for any institution to keep up with it. Now, we had to find our own answers and build our own community through our own participation. The mass-shooting epidemic was just one piece of this much broader reality and much broader challenge. It was all a very loud and very misdirected call from young people for change.