October 2, 2006

What is going on?

I sit here today watching a news conference. The officer on the television is saying that a 32-year old man stormed a one-room school house armed with guns and planks of wood to secure the doors. Once inside he divided the boys from the girls. He released 15 boys and kept and bound between 10-12 young female students, ranging in age from 6-12. He proceeded to shoot all of the girls, killing some of them execution style before shooting himself. The man had no criminal record. He left suicide notes for his wife and children. Two hours after walking his own children to their bus stop, he was shooting innocent little girls. He said in rambling fashion in one of the notes he left that he was getting "revenge" for something that happened 20 years ago. These children were not even a glimmer in their parents’ eyes 20 years ago and now at least three little girls are dead and several others are fighting for their lives. Last week was Colorado, now Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. . . Amish country Pennsylvania.

When Columbine happened many years ago, I was camped out on my living room floor working on a project for one of my classes for my Masters degree in Education. It was Earth shattering then, as I worked on my teaching degree. Once I was a teacher it was terrifying and simultaneously annoying: the multiple school evacuations due to bomb threats scrawled on bathroom mirrors, the afternoons spent camped out in the stadium freezing since we were unable to retrieve any of our personal belongings before evacuating the building yet again, the inquiries from administration as to which students went to the bathroom and when to try to figure out who might have been behind the threat of the day. When I gave up my teaching career, I was especially glad to be done with the bomb threats and the security measures we were constantly being made aware of as they changed and evolved along with each new threat.

As a parent, the increasing amount of school shootings is even more alarming and unsettling. Years ago, other students were the shooters; now they are grown men who are entering our children’s schools and wreaking havoc. Before I had children, I considered homeschooling as an option because sending a child to a school just seemed terrifying to me. I talked myself out of it when I realized my daughter is as stubborn as I am and that it would probably just not work. I rationalized that this doesn’t happen in my area, that the media exaggerates and over reports on these stories, that the instance is actually very rare. Today, it happened close to home and every parent has to be thinking that if it can happen in a one-room Amish school house, My God, it could happen in my child’s school.

How is a parent supposed to protect a child at school? You can hope and pray that the school has safety measures sufficient to protect your children. You can pick and choose where you send your child based on which school you think is the safest. But let’s be honest. . . schools were not built to withstand being stormed by lunatics. School used to be a place where children were safe, where the biggest threat was a bully student. Now, there are grown men, armed with multiple weapons, who threaten our children’s safety and lives.

The only kind of evacuation I ever had to deal with as a child was the mandatory fire drill on occasion. Now children are exposed to much more. When I was a child, I played outside for hours at a time with my friends. Our yards and sidewalks were safe places. Now our playgrounds, sidewalks, and yards are tainted by the memory of Samantha Runnion. Our schools are the target of revenge seeking monsters.

Today I am mourning the loss of these innocent little Lancaster county girls. I am also mourning the fact that my children will never have the kind of care free childhood that I had. And I am angry as hell that I am raising children in this type of world. They deserve so much better.