Adam Patric Miller: America’s Natural Born Son

Is his name really Colt Gray? The name sounds like fiction. Glancingly, I looked at pictures and a white woman’s face comes into my mind with the age 53. A teacher like me. There was another teacher, a guy. Don’t look at the faces of the students. I want to be respectful to my colleagues across the states but I don’t feel as much for them except in the way we do when we hear news like this. I’ve kept a distance from colleagues where I’ve taught for fifteen years most recently in St. Louis. As a writer I know teachers at Apalachee High School didn’t wake in the morning thinking they were going to be murdered by Colt Gray. It’s best not to feel too much for other teachers. They’re too much like me.

But I have felt a lot for students. At times too much feeling—especially when I was new to teaching in a city school—and that connection allowed me to reach students. It also threatened to undo me when, after trying to leave teaching, I was diagnosed with PTSD and clinical depression. “Be careful,” I said to my middle son who studies to be a social worker, “not to over-identify with the people you want to help. If you have powers of empathy, the trouble of other people’s lives can become troubles for you.” It’s easy to visualize the faces of students I knew who were unhoused, executed in a gang shooting, the victim of suicide.

I did see the shaggy hair of Colt Gray when he was being arraigned on YouTube. This may sound perverse, but my heart went to him—I remember when my first son let his teenage hair grow long. Seeing Gray on my computer screen, on YouTube, there were many screens that made him less human, like a fictional character or a ghost or an anime drawing. The human child filmed and photographed and written about was unreachable. The flatness of my computer screen, the distancing of the technology that brought Colt Gray into my office at school, it played a role in the darkness that enveloped him. The F.B.I. knew whatever they can know, his Dad got him a gun, those are facts. And I could write about social media, a society glorifying violence—bullets to politicians’ ears unheard—as the answer to conflict, or be an English teacher and say a disaffected teen is wearing a fictional red hunting hat misinterpreted as a people shooting hat.

What we should try to know is what alienated Colt Gray. No one knew him well enough to help reconnect him to life. I’m not blaming anyone. To look away from our screens, to unplug, to read the signs on the walls of our schools, you have to risk your own well-being. Few want to do that. Who wants a teacher’s job? The community has sunk tax dollars into a wellness center at my school. As a Saturday cynic, I’ll say the wellness center was put in so the school can cover itself if we lose a student to suicide, or maybe a Colt Gray will check in and pet the emotional support dog and no one will die. But I doubt it.

On Monday I’ll return to class. It’s early in the year, I’m learning who my students are. People will talk about the school shooting for a few more days until the topic seeps away. We’ll be overwhelmed by the act of trying to teach. Maybe people will take comfort in our new push-button devices that will call the cavalry as fast as possible if something bad happens. Maybe others will visit the wellness center. The news cycle will spin, we’ll have an election with promises to crack down on guns or whatever, but we must remember this: all our students are Colt Gray—whatever their pronouns, whether or not they store their cellphone in the cellphone holder at the door, no matter how they grow their hair, no matter what their home life is like. And we need to risk something to get to know Colt Gray because he’s America’s natural born son.

Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book A Greater Monster chosen by Phillip Lopate as the winner of the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. Miller has won a Pushcart Prize and a Notable Essay Selection in The Best American Essay Series.