Airing their dirty laundry…

As the launch of the trailer for the Foreward podcast quickly approaches, I find myself feeling anxious.  I’m about to air a lot of people’s dirty laundry. Their secrets.  Their shame.  The things we never said out loud.  

I get it.  We revise our own interpretations of history to protect ourselves.  We clean them up and we wrap them in a bow, but dear God, that’s a boring way to tell a story!  

I am guilty of camouflaging my own history from time to time.  When someone asks me where I’m from, I tell them I was raised in South Park, Colorado.  I don’t want new acquaintances to associate me with the violent shooting that happened in my real home town.  My mother would catch me telling this lie and become frustrated.

“Why don’t you tell them you’re from Conifer?” she’d ask? “That’s what I do.”

For me, saying the name of my hometown felt shameful, because it might lead people to  perceive me as broken.  For my mother, acknowledging that she could have made a different choice and raised her children in another place, a safer place, felt shameful.  

I’m about to air my dirty laundry, my family’s dirty laundry, a whole community’s worth of dirty laundry.  Some of it has been fictionalized.  Some of it has not.  Only those of us who are truly from my hometown will know what’s true and what isn’t.  For the rest of the world, it’s anybody’s guess.  

I’ve already heard the rumblings of the gossip mill of my real hometown.  I know there will be people who don’t approve.  There will be people who don’t like it, and that’s OK.  That’s not who it’s for.

Foreward is for anyone who’s been through a major tragedy and didn’t know if they’d ever recover.

To my knowledge, there isn’t a mainstream piece of film, television, or a podcast that discusses the aftermath of a school shooting.  What does exist in the world of documentary or indie films is usually written on behalf of the perpetrator, not the victims.  

There have been 231 school shootings since Columbine.  If you do the math, the number of people who were impacted by those tragedies is massive.  Every student in those schools was impacted, and the reach is exponential.  Their teachers and their administrators were impacted.  Their parents and siblings and grandparents and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews were impacted.  Their friends who attended other schools were impacted.  Their employers, their coworkers, their neighbors, their coaches, and their larger communities were impacted.  That’s hundreds of thousands of people.   

I am tired of having dirty laundry.  It’s time to wash it, or give it to Goodwill, or burn it up… but it can’t stay in my house anymore.  It’s time to put it out in the world, so someone else can learn the lessons my family and my community learned without having to make the mess themselves.  

It’s time to more FOREWARD. It’s time to air the dirty laundry.

The trailer hits subscriber’s inboxes October 23rd. Make sure you’re on that list.