Almostgotit.com

Child places flowers at Central High after the shooting (Image: KnoxNews..com).

I wish I could find the beautiful article I read sometime in the past year, written by the parent of a child who attended an urban public school in California.  Alas, my husband is the walking human bibliography in the family, not I.

My own school experience was in a wealthy, and lily-white part of Washington State.  Few of us there were the children of jailbirds and prostitutes, so mostly we self-destructed using expensive drugs, expensive cars, and the occasional existential suicide. 

Nor did our parents necessarily love us any more than inner-city parents love their children: ours were often too busy making money and divorcing each other to notice or care when we co-opted their giant houses for our own youthful drug and sex fests.

Life, and love, are both such messy and dangerous things. It breaks my heart to listen in (yes, still watching children talk on Facebook) as my children and their friends try to process, yet again,  the fatal gun shots that were fired in places that should have been their safest havens.  Some of my children’s friends were in the church sanctuary a few weeks ago when Jim David Adkisson began shooting people, and yesterday morning some other young friends were about to start classes at Central High School when another gun started shooting. 

“Were you scared?”  They ask each other.  “Yeah, it was intense,” answers one.  “I’m fine,” writes another child.  “I decided to go to sonic this morning, and I got to school 10 min after the shooting and got turned away from school. It just kinda freaked me out that I missed it by 10 min.”

But it also breaks my heart as other parents begin blaming yesterday’s shooting on the fact that Knoxville’s Central High is an urban school.   The alleged shooter’s  elder adopted sister is wanted for murder, and victim also came from a poor family with a speckled history, so perhaps “we should have seen it coming.”

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, once had an interesting proposal.  She suggested that the United States require that all welfare recipients be sterilized as a condition of receiving any further benefits, which would keep such people from proliferating and ruining the world for the rest of us. 

What do you think?

——–

Related post:A note on Knoxville’s church shooting, and why I have to bring it up now

Child taken into custody following Knoxville school shooting (Image: WBIR.com).

At Knoxville’s Central High school today, a student gunned down and killed another  just before classes began. 

This shooting was a sad, sad thing in our city, still suffering from another senseless church shooting and murder just a few short weeks ago. 

Already, the speculating has begun.  Some folks are trying, as they always do, to make the tragedy into an argument supporting their own cause (e.g., “Public Schools are Bad.”) Others are simply trying to find meaning in meaningless acts of hatred and violence.  In both shootings, however, the perpetrators were deeply troubled individuals whose actions can not be made into “see, I told you so!” examples of anything much,  except what broken people can sometimes do.  

Most unemployed people do not go on shooting sprees, after all.  Even unemployed people who read Conservative Books.  Nor do most public school children go on shooting sprees.

I was very impressed by Central High today.  School administrators there were doing their job when they locked down the school to keep everyone safe.  They were also doing their job when they turned back the throngs of parents who immediately began gathering at the school: emergency personnel needed time and space to focus on the scene until it was secured, and information about individual children could not be released until authorities could be sure that it would not further endanger or mislead anyone. 

Maybe we shouldn’t allow our children to play so many violent video games.  Certainly we shouldn’t have so many guns lying around where people with very little impulse control can so easily get ahold of them.  But relying solely on any of these answers is too dangerous, seducing us too easily into the belief that we can ever control every risk factor or make our children perfectly safe. 

We can’t.

In fact, I am much more disturbed by what happened earlier this week,  at another high school in Knoxville.   A boy suffered a brain injury at Karns High school  after falling from the back of a pickup truck he was riding in a school parking lot, while moving school equipment, and while under the supervision of a shop teacher.  Student Eric Law then waited in a semi-conscious state at the school until his mother arrived to take him to the hospital  — 911 was never called – and died later that morning.

Central High faced a random incident today but had a plan; Karns should have seen that one coming and did very little to stop it.  Who will protect our children from criminally-stupid shop teachers and grossly-negligent school nurses and office personnel?  

There may be individually abusive priests and predatory neighbors, but I’m still sending my own children to church the neighborhood park.  I’m still appreciative of public schools too, but no – I will not be sending any child of mine to Karns.

Yesterday morning, two miles away from my house, a man named Jim Adkisson burst into a church and started shooting people.  Today we found out that Mr. Adkisson has not been able to find a job, and that he’d hoped to die in the shooting, too.

Last Friday, another man named Randy Pausch  did die, after first inspiring an entire nation with his positive approach to life even as he was battling terminal cancer. 

I do not presume to know why these two men reacted so differently to the adversity they faced.  We *can not know* why some people are so much more resilient than others, nor what battles other people may still be fighting. 

Most of the time, I can turn my own anger about my many, MANY rejections into humor — Malcolm Gladwell asserts that all comedy is based on anger! — and for the rest of week I’ll (almost always) be hilarious.  Promise.

But let’s take the topic itself seriously. Telling a hurting, rejected person that he needs to stop feeling what he feels and feel something else instead (”stop wallowing,” etc.) is like rejecting that person all over again. We are a seriously repressed people, and we repress each other, too. I think most of us are afraid that being angry and upset, or even showing that we are angry and upset, metaphorically may be the same as killing people in a church.  It is not.