Editor 's note : CNN contributor Bob Greene is a best-selling author whose forthcoming book is `` Late Edition : A Love Story . '' Bob Greene says kin of Columbine victims do n't have the luxury of moving on after the 10th anniversary is marked . ( CNN ) -- The weddings that will never be held . The birthdays when there will be no one to embrace . The first jobs that will never be greeted with a parent 's proud smile of congratulations . Those are the things -- the sacred things , perhaps the sole things -- that we should pause to think about Monday . Because while the rest of the world considers anew the meaning of what happened 10 years ago at the school in Littleton , Colorado , the people who matter -- the only people who truly can fathom the meaning -- are the people with the wounds in their hearts that will never quite heal : . The mothers and fathers of the children who were murdered . The brothers and sisters who were left with the empty and soundless spaces in their homes and in their lives . For the rest of us , it 's all guesswork , and the anniversary provides a circumscribed time to think about it somberly . But by tomorrow we will have moved on to other concerns , while the mothers and fathers , the sisters and brothers -- the grandfathers and the grandmothers -- will return to that which they can never wish away : . The weddings that wo n't ever come . The birthdays when there is only silence . Is it possible to break that April day from 10 years ago into its incremental elements , as if by doing so we will be able to find a possible future remedy ? If we think enough about the saturation of our society with violent images , from the movies we watch to the video games our children play to the stories on the evening news -- is that what can explain Columbine ? If we dissect the live television coverage of that day when millions stared for hours on end -- was it those unblinking pictures that made the scenes still so hard to shake ? Is there a resolution to be discovered in debates about the guns that were used , the need for security checkpoints ? Those are all just details , not answers . Those are merely facts to be noted . What is worth paying attention to is that we , as a people , have developed , without really wanting to or knowing we were doing it , the thousand-yard stare that you see in the eyes of certain homicide detectives who have been doing their jobs for a very long time . It is a look of utter numbness -- a look that is the opposite of cynical , a look of sorrowful surrender . It is a look that says , of the bearer of those eyes : . My eyes are dead because I know that what they have witnessed is only prologue . My eyes show nothing because they must be prepared for what they know they will be seeing again . To encounter those eyes -- to see the thousand-yard stare -- in a police officer is one thing . But to see it in a country . ... Yet that is what the many years of nonstop killings have done to us . Columbine -- that word , that label -- is the way we sum up this kind of thing , but labels like that are at core our way of conceding our inability to process the despair . There was murderous madness that came before Columbine , and murderous madness that came after . We tell ourselves on each new occasion that what has happened is shocking , but the word has become all but meaningless . The only genuinely shocking thing would be if the cruelty and the killings were to somehow suddenly cease . We can blame all of this on our modern times veering out of control , if we wish , but it really speaks of something more elemental and dark , of factors beyond our earthly understanding . The most deadly attack upon sons and daughters at a school did not occur at Columbine 10 years ago , or at Virginia Tech two years ago . On May 18 , 1927 , in Bath Township , Michigan , 44 people , most of them elementary school pupils in their classrooms , were slaughtered by a man who set off a series of bombs and then killed himself to raise his toll to 45 . He was a member of the local school board ; he was angry about a tax assessment . The madness and the heartache do not belong to a certain era or to a certain place on the map . Nor do the heartache , and the unending echoes of days like those , belong to the rest of us , however honorable we may wish our intentions to be . We -- the rest of us -- will move on by tomorrow . The anniversary will be over . Leaving the mothers and fathers , the sisters and brothers . And the lesson ? The lesson we never seem to learn ? It can be found in words that have been quoted and paraphrased many times , in many languages , over many centuries . But still we ca n't seem to get it right . What is it that we seek ? Something that sounds so simple , something like a prayer : . To tame the savageness of man , and make gentle the life of the world . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bob Greene .
Bob Greene : Thousands of Columbine victims live with the pain every day . Greene : Most people see such incidents with numb eyes and can look elsewhere . The horror of these incidents is the horror of Columbine , he says . He says we eternally have sought to tame human nature .