Pennsylvania school-stabbing victim Nate Scimio wants the world to know he’s OK. Let’s hear it for resilience.
___
This article originally appeared at HyperVocal and is reprinted with permission.
Selfies are just visible, sharable memories with you in the frame.
They’re just photos. They’ve been around forever. We make a big fuss about them because we all just decided to one day in the recent past. We pontificate on presidential selfies. We assign astronomical dollar values to celeb selfies. We coo over old selfies by people we’d never expect to have taken old selfies. We read actors’ op-eds about their meanings. It’s all bile and blather. Selfies are just visible, sharable memories with you in the frame. The end.
So, like the girl who selfie’d after her plane nearly crashed, prepare for the inevitable onslaught of OH NO HE DI’IN’T when the Greater Internet sees this Instagram selfie from Nate Scimio, a stabbing victim from Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, the site of a stabbing spree in which 20 people were injured when a sophomore came to school with knives.
Sure, there’s a level of jumping the gun here, an air of disrespect for others. We barely, and certainly he doesn’t, know the conditions of the other people taken to the hospital. But this is dude in a frantic situation standing up like a badass and saying, “I got stabbed at school today, and here I am, in one piece, I’m fucking fine, and I want you all to see this.”
He’s especially excused in light of the fact that many of his classmates are calling him a hero on Twitter (and, updated below, in print):
Thank god for Nate scimio for pulling the fire alarm #Respect #manythanks #PrayforFR #PrayersforFR
— Bella And Moni (@moniandbella) April 9, 2014
Kids from Franklin tweeting that Nate Scimio pulled the fire alarm that alerted everyone in the school –http://t.co/QvchYVLeY2
— Emmanuelle (@IgnitetheSound) April 9, 2014
UPDATE: The L.A. Times tick-tock has a good indication of Scimio’s heroism:
Trinity McCool, a sophomore, heard something happening behind her but didn’t know what was going on. When she turned around, she saw two boys and a girl on the ground; the girl had a gash in her arm.
Then she saw the attacker. He came toward her — but then another student, Nate Scimio, got between them and was attacked first instead, McCool said.
After Scimio was gashed, the attacker continued to chase McCool and a friend down the hall for a few seconds before apparently turning away, McCool said. “I later heard screams down the halls, so I assumed he turned around and went the opposite way,” McCool said.
At some point a fire alarm was tripped — some students said by Scimio — and students began flooding out of the school. Aubrey Livengood, a sophomore, said she was in the library printing a class project with a friend when she saw people running down the hallway, screaming for others to run away.
You can scoff, and you can shake your fist and head, but there’s something altogether empowering about this one. You better believe there would have been a whole bunch of Instagram selfies on 9/11. People standing tall.
Follow Slade Sohmer on Twitter