I was placing a book on a shelf in the library when he tore apart my stomach with a mail-order assault rifle. I was binging and purging with my girlfriends when my ass-hugging denim was splattered with intestines. The armed and angry schoolboys exacted their vengeance upon my American cliché inside a normal suburban high school. I died on the TV news and America’s teeth chattered rapidly, coked up on the taste of vulnerability.

The recently released Gus Van Sant movie Elephant tells the story we know as Columbine, as the shocking things we didn’t know, as the world never being the same again. The title of the movie refers to the proverbial elephant in the living room—the big problem that is ignored for so long that people are no longer able to recognize it. The endless critical acclaim heaped upon Elephant reflects America’s obsession with me, the good white boy who is smart, athletic, straight and predictable. The person who doesn’t die young, who doesn’t get shot in an institution that revolves around my existence.

After carrying this identity into Elephant, I couldn’t stop thinking about my disillusionment with the American discourse in Columbine’s wake. I attended a mostly wealthy and white private high school at the time of the shootings and everyone around me freaked out. I just couldn’t figure out what everyone had to worry about—their lives were so easy. All of a sudden we were reminded of the value of some children and the worthlessness of others. What about the kids getting shot in North Minneapolis every year? Did that make the national news? Of course it didn’t—those people are supposed to endure terror and violence.

The dialogue changes as people suffer when they aren’t “supposed to”—it puts some gravel into the voice of the privileged. Things get real for parents who realize that wealth and whiteness alone doesn’t protect their children. So the mantra became that the world would never be the same, when in fact the world was still the same disastrous place. Billions of people still suffered in abject poverty, even as soccer moms feared for little Bobby. The real elephant in the living room is not the trenchcoat-bearing suburbanite or the hijaab-adorned girl, but America’s preoccupation with its own skewed reflection.

This overwhelming absurdity left me laughing about Elephant, and it left me more emotionally removed from the 9/11 attacks than I’d like to admit. Tragically, by holding the happy American’s rare pain high over the persistent suffering of the world’s margin, we lose insight into what events like Columbine and 9/11 really mean. We have to stop and remember that we live in a bizarre microcosm of wealth and stability, in a place where monstrous acts of violence are normally reserved for far off places and peoples.

Our mourning of such awful, violent moments is easily devalued by the power which defines our being. It leads us to worry about the wrong thing: the portion of America (or the portion of the world, for that matter) which has and always will do just fine. Every time I’m reminded of the world changing because of what’s happened to America, I want to respond that the world is changing because of what America is doing to it. If we want to have a realistic worldview, we cannot judge the world’s motion through the myopia of our own heartbreak.