Sixteen months ago shots rang out at our neighborhood middle school. Police were called. Helicopters flew overhead. Reporters swarmed the streets. That was Atlanta, the southeastern United States. And we watched as poor children, predominantly black and brown, stood shaking and crying in the arms of terrified parents. Anger and terror and shock rolled through the streets of our community like a wave.
Today, two thousand, six hundred and forty miles away in the "great northwest", shots are fired again. This time at a local high school just 9 miles from our home in Portland, Oregon. Police were called. Reporters swarm. Predominantly middle-class, white parents stand shaking, crying, waiting in the streets for their children to be released to them. The local newspaper reports that this is the 74th school shooting on an American school campus since Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, December 2012. Seventy-four.
I watched the story unfolding this morning across half the flat screens hanging from the ceiling of my local gym - bold headlines across the top of the screens, real time information scrolling along the bottom, images of crying parents, grim-faced officers and dozens of police cars with lights still flashing looping again and again in the middle. From the gym sound system, in ironic and almost mocking contrast, blared Pharrell's popular pop hit, "Happy."
I stepped off the treadmill, fighting back the tears that were threatening and the ache in my heart. "I guess we're not so happy after all," I thought as I headed for the locker room. And all the dancing, "room without a roof" music in the world wasn't changing that. I sighed as I closed the locker and headed back through the gym to the parking lot. I started my car and the story continued to follow me, spilling from the car radio. I groaned as they continually referred to "the shooter" and "the students" as though the student with the gun had not been child as well.
They are all crying out to us, whether from poverty or privilege, hoping that we will hear them over the drone of our own voices and respond. While hiding underneath cheap department store make-up and expensive Beats headphones, they want to be seen. And though working overtime to appear aloof, cool, brooding or indifferent, like us, they want to be considered and understood. Because at the end of it all, "the shooter" and the "student victims" are often one and the same.
They were all kids - tired, frightened, angry, lonely...armed children. And all our liberal freedom and conservative rights, our i-technology and PC windows, no-whip lattes and cleansing juices, electric cars, legal weed, organic food, 401K's, IRAs, NRAs, cul-de-sacs and condos, Prozac and Zoloft, gun loving, Obama hating, smart phones, smart houses, smart cars or dummy books haven't been able to help them. We have to help our children. We have to save our marriages. We have to fight for our families and our neighbors. We have to rescue our faith from our politics and our friendships from social media. We have to reconcile our communities and we have to do it today.
74 schools... and counting.
