The Dark Night...

Last night, I was about halfway done writing my review of The Dark Knight Rises when I heard about the shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Like so many other Batman-crazed fans, I fought the costumed crowds to see the movie at midnight. It was worth every second. I left the theater smiling, discussing various plot points with Jenn and making plans to see it again.

Then, a mere two hours later, as I sat, extolling Christopher Nolan's brilliant juxtaposition of privilege and poverty, truth and lies, and order and anarchy, everything changed. The haunting chaos and destruction that Nolan and his fictional villains so vividly brought to life in the Batman movies had truly come to life in an unsuspecting suburb of Denver.

This horrific crime, this senseless, scary crime, was committed almost in a demented tribute to the film franchise so many of us love, a deeply disturbed fan's attempt to actualize something so appalling that it only seemed possible in the movies. How chilling that that's exactly where it happened.

So, I sat in my living room, my heart breaking for these strangers that were just like me, for their families and friends whose lives will never be the same. My heart broke for the cast and crew of the movie, who worked so hard to create such a fantastic film that will forever be associated with something so unthinkable.

But mostly, it made me realize how lucky I am to have today. There is no real reason why this deeply troubled man happened to live in Aurora, Colorado. This could just as easily have happened in any suburb of any city across America, in any sold-out showing of any crowded auditorium in the country.

In fact, one of the victims, Jessica Ghawi, was a 24-year-old aspiring sportscaster, a devoted hockey fan, and an intern for the You Can Play Project, a campaign started in honor of my late Miami classmate Brendan Burke to eliminate homophobia in sports. Her second-to-last blog post, entitled "I Like My Hockey How I Like My Men," compared various NHL teams to the different types of guys available for dating. It's sobering, and beyond upsetting, that a complete stranger, living a life so eerily similar to mine, met her tragic and untimely end at the same movie I saw last night, both of us in Auditorium 9.

Sometimes, it takes something this awful, this shocking to open our eyes to the fragility of life. If nothing else, this tragedy serves as a reminder to cherish every moment. As cliche as it sounds, every single day is a gift. Nothing is promised to us.

So now, as we prepare for weeks of character analysis, debates on gun rights and the treatment of mental health, condemnations of violent movies and video games, and attacks on our media-crazed culture, I'm sure many of us will be afraid. Afraid of copy-cat killers and terrified that members of our society are capable of committing such atrocities. I hope that we don't feed into the frenzy that James Holmes wanted to create. We can't give him the satisfaction of knowing that he harnessed the same power as fictional terrorists, like Bane or the Joker.

At a time like this, it's hard not to dwell on everything that's wrong with the world. The only way to move on, however, is to remember the good, remain positive, and stand up for what's right, not unlike Bruce Wayne himself. I know that, with time, the people of Aurora, Colorado will prevail. They will show James Holmes, and others like him, that the horrific actions of a few will not change the mentality of the whole, that although they will never forget, they can forge ahead, and that good does, in fact, triumph over evil.

They will rise in their own way above that dark night and I wish them all the best.