Floor Plans To EMpathy

These are the floor plans of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Pulse Nightclub, and the Aurora Century 16 Movie Theater

—to name a few.

This series was conceived to combat what’s been, for me, a barrier to a deeper degree of empathy. Nearly 80 mass shootings* have occurred in my lifetime and I still have not been able to get beyond feelings of compassion, sorrow, and shock to reach an empathy that feels more complete.

In an attempt to overcome the barrier to this other empathy, I tried to distill the specific places (the sites of the shootings) to places or spaces that I knew—the hope being that I could feel this other empathy through recognition, through familiarity.

So the question became—how many details do I have to strip away to make each story my own? To make each place my own? At which point does the Aurora movie theater become the one in my town?

I’ve been looking at floor plans as part of a phylogenetic tree of spaces we share. The floor plans are a sort of skeleton—a reminder of our common ancestry. When a tragedy occurs somewhere in this tree—in one of these spaces—everyone "downstream" feels it and the tragedy reverberates beyond that specific place to all spaces—from Sandy Hook to all elementary schools, from Pulse to all night clubs.

I realized that the deeper kind of empathy I sought is actually pretty basic and fundamental, though largely forgotten—shrouded by the “lowercase f” facts: the shooter’s motive, the number of minutes until police responded, the rounds of ammo; like the details of the specific place—the color of the front door, the kind of tiles on the floor, the number of windows.

When you strip away the details of the event and of the place, you are left with the same basic structure, the “capital f” Fact—people were killed and they were killed in spaces within which we were supposed to coexist. Once you realize that “capital f” Fact, it’s tough to ignore the commonality at the core of human experience these days.

The skeletal structure of the Aurora movie theater looks a hell of a lot like that of my hometown movie theater—as do the skeletons of the killers and the skeletons of the killed and the skeletons of the people I share my days and space with it.

*Defined as a shooting in which at least three people were killed, not including the gunman.