I had been at my new job at the Littleton Independent office for only two weeks April 20, 1999.

My desk was right by one of the huge streetside windows looking out on Main Street from our newsroom. The police scanner from which I heard the first reports of the Columbine High School shootings was a few desks behind me. None of it seemed real until the seemingly endless stream of ambulances, police cars and SWAT trucks began blazing past that window toward Columbine.

There is a surreal nature to all tragic events, but I’ve never experienced anything like this. Not in a day, or in the weeks and months that followed.

And the grieving evolved into action.

Law enforcement tried to learn from Columbine so it could better respond to events like this in the future. School security changed. Task forces were formed to better understand the things kids deal with day in and day out. The term bully-proofing was born. There was a collective promise to never forget.

A decade has passed. Have we kept that promise? By that, I’m not referring to license plates, scholarship funds, bumper stickers and occasional memories. Don’t get me wrong, they have their place. But I’m talking about the meaty part of the promise proved by real change among those parts of the community that rallied behind the cause in the early days.

As the grim anniversary approached again, our news editor, Chris Rotar, worked with reporters Holly Cook and Chris Michlewicz to take a look at the changes to school policy and law enforcement that have come about in the past 10 years.

What you’ll read in their work is that a lot has happened, but a lot still needs to happen. You’ll read a fair amount about budget cuts. You’ll read about good intentions, but also how urgency slips away with the passage of time.

What hopefully becomes clear in these stories and the reflection that comes with the milestone of a 10th anniversary like this is that the promises of never forgetting and making lasting change for the future can’t be institutional. Those things have to come from us as individuals.

That’s where the meat of the promise will be kept. They happen in the way we deal with society, children, violence, safety and all the other factors that were in play with the Columbine shootings. And they happen quietly and manifest themselves in safer times to come.

I’m not one who subscribes to theories of absolutes. I don’t think Columbine was the result of some sort of societal dysfunction for which we’re all to blame.

I happen to think that some people are just plain evil and they can wreak havoc on the rest of us when we least suspect they will. But in my heart of hearts, I don’t think that explains it all, either. As is usually the case when I look at these things, I find the truth somewhere in the middle.

For the part we can or should take responsibility to change, we need to do our best as individuals to carry through with the changes that dominated our thinking when Columbine was fresh in our minds.

Ten years later, it’s harder to do than it was then. But if we do that, that promise will be kept.

Jeremy Bangs is the managing editor of Colorado Community Newspapers. His e-mail address is jbangs@ccnewspapers.com.

I don’t think Columbine was the result of some sort of societal dysfunction for which we’re all to blame.