"For dust you are and to dust you shall return."
As many in America take today to begin a period of penitence and reflection, of sacrifice and fasting, there's news of yet another mass shooting inside a high school in Florida. As some cover their heads in ashes, others get placed into body bags. There's families in prayer and families in mourning.
Families in prayer, families in mourning: it's become such a common place in America. We aren't even sixty days into the new year and there have already been eight mass shootings in schools with injuries or fatalities. Yet we continue to answer violence with nothing but thoughts and prayers, nothing more than words to each other and words to a Higher Power.
Why is violence in our own homes committed by our own children so very different than violence committed by the hands of a child of another country? Why is our answer to violence only more violence or words with no meaning? Words only hold so much power...offering thoughts and prayers only make us feel better that we are powerless to the darkness we've allowed to consume our people because we feel it is our right to do as we damn well please, that it is our entitlement as people of this country to walk down the street with machines that only exist for the purpose to kill.
I'm tired of all of these useless offers of thoughts and prayers. I am angered by the argument that "guns don't kill" I am so sick of the water cooler conversations about how we could solve this problem by arming teachers. Violence does not change violence; hate does not eliminate hate.
I am a teacher: I am trained to help children learn, grow, feel safe, be protected. I am a teacher and I take my job very seriously. I am a teacher, but I'm not trained to have a gun, to know how to avoid having a student take me down for that gun, to know when to fire it. I will happily never purchase a gun in my lifetime, I would be grateful to never hold a firearm even for a moment. But I would also take a bullet for any child at my school without a moment's hesitation. I would do anything and give my life to know that my students were safe...even use my $4,000 flute against a shooter if needed.
I hate that I spend every afternoon questioning if I said or did anything that day that might have upset a child enough that they might return tomorrow with a gun. I hate that I have students that I have seen break down into tears because of the hate others have shown them, because of the pain in their hearts. I hate that I have to hug my girls extra tight on mornings like tomorrow because I fear that there might not be an afternoon to pick them up.
To ashes we may return, but why not in a car crash or a heart attack? Why must so many return to ashes at the hands of another who is armed with a killing machine that my neighbors keep insisting should be available almost everywhere you turn? I could never take the life of another no matter what that person did, not even those that still haunt me in my sleep.
Put down your firearms, your knives, your nuclear weapons and think: what is your life worth? Is the life of a child worth this, worth owning a damn gun?
No comments:
Post a Comment