On December 14 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut and killed 20 young children and 6 adults who were staff members and teachers. It wasn't the first school shooting and to our shame it won't be the last but it was among the most deadly. We should not forget.
My title alludes to my 2 previous diaries, one written the night of the shooting and one a year later (here and here). The Sandy Hook shooting shocked me in a way that none of the previous school shootings did. It shocked many of us with the utter senselessness of the killings and the howling injustice of children and teachers killed in spasm of random caustic violence. I wish there was something new to say about progress towards preventing the next tragedy on this 2nd anniversary but there isn't. I want to be wrong, but I see obfuscation rather than consensus on identifying proximate or ultimate causes of this violence and no movement on policies that might prevent the next one. Even among this relatively homogeneous community, discussions on the broad topic of what, if anything, to do about gun violence in schools get diverted into rancor and defensiveness.
It's a cruel irony that the Sandy Hook killings coincided with Advent, a season of hope in Christian traditions. This second anniversary of the injustice of murdered first- and second-graders arrives in and is compounded by a choking cloud of injustice, coming as it does on heels of the grand jury decisions on the Michael Brown and Eric Garner killings and in the shadow of the release of the Senate's summary report on torture. I wish I could say that Sandy Hook was an aberration but it's not. Earlier this week, The Huffington Post was reporting that there have been 95 school shootings since Sandy Hook. That cloud is suffocating and dark. For some here who have said so explicitly, that cloud chokes off hope and obscures the horizon so that we cannot see where the next hit will come from, but come it will. I feel like a pervasive evil is winning. In this sense its fitting that Advent is also a season of longing for deliverance. I long for peace...for Ferguson, for New York, for Newtown, for the next community, for the middle east.
I've been re-reading the news accounts of the tragedy and I keep returning to the words of Connecticut's commissioner of the department of emergency services and public protection (http://cspsandyhookreport.ct.gov/...)
...In the midst of the darkness of that day, we also saw remarkable heroism and glimpses of grace. We saw Sandy Hook Elementary faculty and staff doing everything in their power to protect their charges.
-Commissioner Reuben F. Bradford
Everything in their power... At Sandy Hook Elementary, for many, the 'everything' in this cliche'd phrase included rushing the shooter, blocking the door with one's wounded body, and putting one's body between the shooter and the children... and dying for it. Details are murky but a singular picture emerges from the chaos of those moments. It's one of teachers and staff who hid and sheltered children, setting aside their own fear and self-interest to do so. That's the best of who we are.
Reflecting on this touches something primal in me. My wife is an elementary school teacher as is my mom, now retired after 30+ years in a classroom. I love my kids with an intensity that frightens me a little. If called to, I would die for them. I'd bet that the parents in Sandy Hook would say the same and irrational as it may be, part of the injustice and loss that they must be feeling is that they were denied the opportunity.
I remember first grade because I was the new kid. I started a week late because our family moved. I was shy and had no older siblings to buffer me and I vividly remember standing alone and invisible on a playground full of kids and being paralyzed with the anxiety and vulnerability of not knowing anybody and not knowing what to do to make a friend. And then Mrs. E found me. Mrs. E was my teacher and I remember her as being relatively young with long brown hair and a kind manner. She asked me if I would be willing to give up my recess time to help her. She took me in to a small work room and gave me a big bowl of finger paint to stir. She had mustered 2 other student volunteers and within 20 minutes or so there were 2 kids whom I knew by name and with whom I had a shared experience. Later that year while the class was working at their desks, she called me up to her desk and invited me to peek over her shoulder at a new text book. She flipped the pages and I saw a drawing of the solar system and a cross section of an apple with the parts labelled. She then told me in conspiratorial tones that she had picked up on my interest in science and that she would begin teaching science using the new text in a week or two. "It'll be our secret for now. Don't tell." she said. The only explanation for these anecdotes is that Mrs. E went out of her way to make an insecure little boy feel safe and welcome and important in his classroom. That's what good teachers do and it goes beyond simple instruction. And 40+ years later, I remember.
Reflecting on Sandy Hook I find myself asking: would Mrs E have put herself between her students and a gunman? Would my wife? My mom? Those are heavy questions and I've been mulling them over this week. I want to be careful here so I've been pouring those questions through a deliberately constructed mental filter. It's a filter of cynicism and skepticism built of accretions of adult disappointments in leaders, and institutions, and government. Its elements include experiences with selfish craven politicians, with willful ignorance, and with greed and avarice. Its seasoned with the knowledge that no group is monolithically saintly. I pour those questions through the filter again and again and what I recover in terms of an answer leaves me helpless: Yes.
I don't know what that is... but it feels a little like hope.
Teachers commit subtle acts of heroism every day. Sandy Hook illustrates the depth of that commitment when the circumstances call.
The loss of one's child carries with it a grief that can only be fully appreciated by someone who's experienced it. I don't know if remembering or memorializing helps or not. I hope it does. To that end, I would ask that we honor the families of Sandy Hook by recalling the teachers and children who have touched our lives, perhaps with a story or two in the comments.
And if you pray, remember the Sandy Hook families and the special grief they are experiencing today.