Never Forget

April 20th is a date I cannot forget, for two reasons:

In 1999 , two students murdered 12 people at Columbine High School and injured 21 others

It's one of those incidents where we will always remember where we were when we heard about it. The sadness that it brings to our hearts: all those innocents killed or hurt for no reason. The shootings that followed Columbine .

In 2010 11 humans and countless denizens of the Gulf of Mexico are gone or severely affected.

Five years later, oil is still washing up on shore,, bottlenose dolphins and sea turtles are still being affected,an oil chemical from the spill has been shown to cause irregular heartbeats in the embryos of bluefin and yellowfin tuna and thousands of sea birds have died and those that survived show abnormalities.

The lives of people living on the Gulf Coast are forever changed.

We'll never forget the photos of oiled birds (I cannot bring myself to post pictures, it's just too tragic), the smell of the oil burning in the Gulf (yes, we could smell it when the winds were right), our beaches unaccessible after the spill, finding tar balls on the beaches when they opened again. So many bad memories.

These are two April 20th memories I'll never forget.