It was a nice Easter Sunday. As we do annually at some of the big holidays — Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter — we had dinner at our friends’ house. The crowd varies a bit each time, but it’s usually us, our friends, their kids, various aunts and uncles, their remaining grandparent.
We had a lovely dinner. We talked, ate. Dessert came and went, and we talked some more. Coffee, more talk. I floated around from conversation to conversation, as I usually do. Listening, talking.
And then, the most innocuous-seeming question from my wife to a friend:
“How’s she doing?”
“She” is that friend’s daughter. This daughter is an adult of some 30 years of age whom we have known since she was born. Our kids have grown up together. We often see her at these gatherings, but “she” was not at this dinner.
“How’s she doing?”
She was not doing well. What’s the matter, I asked? What’s going on?
She was a witness to the school shooting in Maryland. It happened near her classroom. The body of the victim lay just outside her door.
I had forgotten completely that she taught at that school, that she even taught in that county.
And here she is, struggling to piece together how to deal with what had transpired in her school, just mere feet away. This isn’t some high school kid trying to keep it all together. This is an adult. A competent, intelligent, accomplished, dedicated teacher, and the enormity of this tragedy had hit her every bit as full on as it has hit everyone else in their community.
These school shootings have shock wave effects that ripple through a community and devastate it, even with the adults who are tasked with holding it all together after such an event. No, ESPECIALLY with these adults. These shock waves are more like tsunamis, and the shootings themselves like the earthquakes that are their cause.
And so a tragic event that seemed distant, albeit in my own state, has such force that it reaches right into our holiday celebration and washes over all of us.
There is an element in our society that treats all this as blithely as they might treat an intersection that needs better engineering. “Oh, someone died. That’s too bad. Let’s put up better signage.” That’s what I hear in my head when Rick Santorum says that kids should learn CPR. That’s the extent of the moral outrage that comes from those who say that kids should just be nicer to the lonely kid. That’s the kind of public commitment that comes from those who think the solution is arming teachers. To them, there is no real moral conundrum. To them, there are no real consequences to the horror.
But to those who live it, around it, or near it, it’s a tidal wave of horror and destruction, and it reaches far, far from it’s center as it spreads to anyone within striking distance. The effects are devastating, and lasting.
Fie on those who treat this epidemic with such glib contempt. They are complicit in the destruction.