a lifetime of fear
I got the news about the shooting in Nashville - BREAKING NEWS: Nashville school shooting: 3 killed. Developing story - the latest in what seems to be a never-ending scroll of headlines, while walking down the hallway in my own school.
I spent dinner with my housemates mostly staring off into space - in terrified awe of what we have let this world become. I took a walk to clear my head. More accurately, I forced myself to get out of my house, into the sunshine, and try to bring my awareness back into my body after feeling like I was floating somewhere far off.
I found myself walking a path similar to the one I took in the early weeks of lockdown - in search of early spring flowers and brightly colored houses - anything to remind me that the world still had good in it, even if it felt small. I walked past the same parks, the same bodega, the same chartreuse house I became oddly attached to in March of 2020. But how do I hold that hope when children are dead?
I hate that this feeling is familiar. I hate that these headlines are familiar. I hate that the arguments and the push-back and the empty promises are familiar.
I found some solidarity and some language for the hopelessness I’m feeling in this poem from David Gate, shared today.
I want to hug my children tonight because
I love them and not because I am relieved
they were not killed in today’s school shooting.
I want to look at them
with tear-filled eyes of tenderness
for their own beautiful beings
and not because I know this country
could rip them from me at any moment.
I want my little ones to see my love
stemming from them alone and not because
their father is haunted by the news;
the news that doesn’t change;
the news we could become.
The news we could become. A parent’s greatest fear. A teacher’s heaviest worry. Another young generation’s burden they shouldn’t have to carry.
There are reports from mass shootings outside of schools of children guiding their parents using their knowledge from active shooter drills. We have continually placed the burden of surviving this violence in the hands of children instead of fighting to protect them BEFORE the violence starts.
Students shouldn't have to be afraid - what if I’m stuck in the bathroom alone when it happens? What if I’m outside at recess? My friends and I shouldn't have to worry about what we'd do if this happened at our school - how long we could hold someone off? Would it give our kids a fighting chance? My sister and her colleagues in Special Education shouldn't have to strategize how they’ll protect her students with mobility limitations - is she strong enough to carry them? Can they stay quiet?
I was six years old when the shooting happened at Columbine, the first (and still one of the most deadly) mass school shooting the US had ever experienced.
Now I’m thirty, one of the oldest in a generation that doesn’t remember life before these headlines, these drills, this horrific reality.
In April of 1999, I was too young to remember watching the news - but old enough to remember the fear I felt emanating from the adults around me.
Too young to really understand why we started to practice hiding under our desks with the lights off, having to be quiet like a mouse - but old enough to notice that my teacher seemed tense for the rest of that day.
Now I’m a teacher and I’m the one leading students through these drills. Praying to God and pleading to politicians, terrified that we will, inevitably, become the news.
A note: Truthfully, I simply needed to get these swirling thoughts out of my head. I am not interested in arguments about the efficacy of gun reform, the ideas to arm teachers, or blaming this on mental health.
I know that the typical rule of the internet is that posting something means an open conversation. But in this moment, as an educator, I do not have it in me to debate you. I need to focus my energy on the kids I teach every day and teachers I work with who are scared and feeling hopeless and so full of rage.
Please direct that energy elsewhere. Those conversations are important and worth having, but I cannot be that person. There are so many incredible resources to be found and I’d encourage you to start there before asking those most closely affected to speak to your what-ifs and what-abouts.
