As I wrote in the previous post, I am working on a compilation of my writings over the years, Whatever: The Art of Moving On.
One of the things I wrote about is school shootings, spurred by a fatal shooting in our biology lab—five years before Columbine—at the high school where I taught for 39 years, the implementation of lockdown drills, and the ever-present question of how I should or might react if we had a shooter in the building.
I tried to prepare by reading extensively on school shootings, including Columbine by Dave Cullen. And I wrote a short story scenario, “Black and White,” about a typical school day shattered by an active shooter. That short story was the genesis for a novel I wrote, Internal Lockdown, about a school shooting in progress over the course of four hours.
After the Sandy Hook shootings, I penned a memoir entitled “Thoughts and Prayers,” which includes excerpts from a real conversation we had a few days later at a Christmas gathering about gun rights and mental health, and how to defend a school. Some politicians were/are suggesting teachers should be armed.
“What do you think, Chief?” I asked our school safety officer. We call him Chief because he used to head the police department in a neighboring town. “Do you want to carry a gun in school?”
“Hell, no. Are they going to give me an automatic weapon like all these guys carry? Are they going to give teachers automatic weapons and a massive supply of bullets in September? If a bad guy wants to kill people, he is going to get into the building somehow, and he is going to do it.”
“What about at least closing loopholes or doing better background checks, Russ?” said John, a social studies teacher.
“This guy stole his mother’s guns, and she had them legally,” Russ said.
“Good point,” I acknowledged.
“The real problem is the shooter,” Chief said. “They all showed mental health red flags, but no one helped them, or the help wasn’t available.”
“What about the kid who shot up the bio lab?” Russ asked while accepting a fresh Yuengling from Edmund.
“I was there for that,” said Edmund, a maintenance guy at the high school. “They made us clean up that mess. Some of the kid’s brains were on the ceiling tiles.”
I also excerpt an editorial I wrote for the high school newspaper:
Know that good can spring from evil.
A few years ago, we had the “Friends of Rachel” assembly here. This nationwide movement honors the memory of the first victim at Columbine, Rachel Scott, by urging others to be kind to each other and to start a chain reaction.
While the Sandy Hook shooter’s actions are indefensible and inexcusable, he was apparently the kind of vulnerable person we may encounter but ignore, or worse, reject, every day. He had few friends, was described as “socially awkward” and “weird,” and he was labeled a “nerd.”
If you want to honor the victims in Connecticut, make it a point to speak to or speak up for the “outsiders” in our school; see the human being, not the label.
Shortly before her death, Rachel Scott wrote, “People will never know how far a little kindness can go.”
Maybe that can be our “doing something.” And if—when—it happens again, perhaps we can have politicians clean human tissue off ceiling tiles.
The Q-View 