"I felt like until about a half an hour ago that I was holding my breath all day."
That's KMOX's Carol Daniel on the Dave Glover Show, talking about the tragic shooting that occurred at the Central Visual and Performing Arts school on Monday. Carol was on KMOX's airwaves as the situation was happening, watching live and listening as more information came in.
"We have gone through this before. I mean, I've been broadcasting since college, since the 1980s," Carol told DGS. "These things have become much more frequent, of course, in the last 20 yeras. But we've done this before. I mean, I was on the air when Columbine happened – I didn't even know how to say Columbine."
Carol said she remembered reporting on Sandy Hook, too. "I can't cry, I can't cry, I can't cry," she recalled telling herself. "Because I had children that similar age," she said. "And you do think those things when anyone who passes dies or is killed, you think, 'That's my mother's age, that's my son's age, my husband's age, that's my age.'"
KMOX's Debbie Monterrey's daughter attends the school where the shooting happened today. We're grateful that she's safe and unharmed, but Debbie was on air Monday morning when her daughter started texting her, saying there was a shooter.
Carol said her son had experienced similar things, like a student at his school building pipe bombs and getting arrested. And, he was on Mizzou's campus during the 2016 protests.
"Someone put on some social media platform, 'I'm going to kill all the black people that I see,'" Carol said. "That person was arrested, charged, jailed. And my son who was at Mizzou at the time said, 'The professor told us we got to come to class.' And I said, 'Don't go.'"
"We all have some sort of violence that has touched us. But to sit here and then to realize Debbie's getting these text messages, and she's continuing because there's a person sitting where I am sitting now, we are interviewing somebody live in the studio. This woman, we hustled her out of here. She didn't know what was going on. But to realize that now, I felt like, that's just what you have to do."
So how do we keep handling these tragedies? Carol said it becomes an issue of the heart and the soul.
"Because we have, I feel it's apparent, have drawn such sides – and there's a middle here – but some on the sides have decided that, I've got to stay in power, I need more power. And in order for me to have that I have to demonize you. And so when I demonize you, my soul is not in play. My heart is not in play. And we cannot solve issues together. Because we are too busy demonizing one another," she said.
Dave and Carol talked about the importance of heart in these decisions, rather than power.
"My bishop says you cannot save what you don't love," Carol said. "And if you don't love the city, if you don't love Kim Gardner, if you don't love Governor Parson, and I mean that's a soul. You know, the Bible calls on us to love. And people talk about being Christians when it comes to abortion, but it ends there. We don't talk about love when it comes to humanity and each other, because you're a Republican, you're a Democrat, you're for this, you're for that. And I don't love you because I act like I don't love you. And so when my pastor says you can't save what you don't love, for me, that's a mirror check."
Hear the full conversation between Carol Daniel and the Dave Glover Show on KMOX:
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