Humanity amongst the Horror

It has taken me awhile to write the following. I have started and been stymied numerous times over the past few weeks, only to return again and again to the topic because I believe that it is essential that it be addressed.

But even now I do not feel as though I have done it justice, for words are ultimately an inadequate medium. I am uncomfortable with what I have written, and I remain deeply troubled and conflicted because I am unable to resolve the nightmarish suffering of those students who died and the unimaginable scarring of those who survived.

There has been nothing therapeutic or cathartic about my reflections. In fact, just the opposite: the more I mull over what occurred, the more I attempt to place it into some kind of social or educational or moral context, the deeper the morass into which I sink.

For I can only find questions to ask, and those questions have no satisfactory answers: What kind of country do we live in? How can we allow such things to happen to our children? What kind of world do we inhabit? How can our God(s) allow such things to happen to the innocent?

I have read a series of reports from all over the country from reporters, police, sociologists, psychiatrists, educators, politicians, students, and my colleagues. I have listened to the politicians, to the pundits, to the usual talking heads, but no one has put my mind at ease nor have they articulated how or why this could have occurred.

I have researched the numbers of school shootings in American schools over the last decade and know that they are relatively consistent over time: 45 in 1992-93, 41 in 1993-94, 36 in 1997-98, 29 in 2003-04. But I can take only so much solace in truisms such as "Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people." I am a firm believer in gun-control, but to argue that denying guns to Americans would lessen the number of children killed in school seems patently reductive at a time like this.

I imagine my daughter being one of those girls, and I cringe to think of her trying so desperately to attempt to make sense of what was happening to her. Those girls were just students in a one room school house. They were in class, just like any other day, giggling, learning, innocent, utterly unaware of the apocalyptic suffering some sociopathic pervert planned to inflict on them.

I am not by nature a pessimist; as an educator I traffic in the optimism that people can change, that there are ideals worth striving towards, and that education precedes enlightenment. But in cases like this, my faith in education only takes me so far, for there is evil loose in the world to be visited on my daughter, our students, your children.

So where does that leave me?

Ultimately I suppose that I embrace the Amish response - that the answer to violence is non-violence, that the answer to hatred is love, and that the answer to evil is to do good - not because I can empathize with them, because God knows I can't, but because I can't see any other solutions that will allow us all to carry on.

A mother of one of the slain Amish girls released an open letter to her neighbors in which she said the following: "Your love for our family has helped provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you have given have touched our hearts in a way that no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is sincerely changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you."

I am humbled by this mother's ability to celebrate community, to thank those who are compassionate, and to see the good in her neighbors. And I can only wish that her sentiments will illuminate the way to a more humane future for us all.

--Steve McKibben
10/20/06