Monsters

What have we become? 
In a world degenerating 
What have we become? 

Speak your mind, look out for yourself 
The answer to it all is a life of wealth 
Grab all you can cause you live just once 
You got the right to do whatever you want 

~ "What Have We Become" - DC Talk


Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

~ "The Second Coming" - W.B. Yeats

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(Be warned.  This will not be especially coherent.)

I didn't know anything about Sandy Hook until my planning period.  I had felt my phone buzzing in my pocket all day from incoming emails, but I thought they were just the usual flurry of IFFT actions and holiday ads.  When I saw how many of them were from the CNN Alert service, I knew something dreadful had occurred.  Nothing, however, nothing at all ever could have prepared me for what was in those mails.

Everybody knows the story by now.  I won't retell it here, especially since just right now there are so very many gaps in it.  What I can't stop thinking about is how scared those poor children were and what it means for the ones who survived as well as for the families of the ones who are lost.

We take it for granted that some places are held commonly sacred, safe zones that nobody will harm.  We think of churches, hospitals, schools as places where the monsters cannot or will not go.  We take it for granted that some people, the very young, the very old, pregnant women, are not to be pulled into the violence that seems to surround us on all sides now.  I'm not sure how wise it is for us to do this, but I think maybe it's necessary.  We have to keep believing that some things are valuable, are (dare I say it?) holy, because if we don't, then the very last of the good is gone and the monsters have won.  We have to trust someone, some place, because if we don't, I'm not sure we can stay sane.

No child should ever know fear in a school.  I know that the all-pervasive culture of bullying and, for lack of a better term, hatefulness is deeply ingrained in the life of elementary and secondary students.  I know, too, that some children fear their classmates and that there are situations that make this completely and totally justifiable.  What happens to us as a world, though, when the thing they have to fear is not a cutting comment but rather the end of their lives?  We're lost.  We're so lost when this happens that I am not sure we can be found.

I am no parent, but I am a teacher.  I pray to God that I never, ever know what it's like to have a shooter in my building, to be in lockdown waiting to see if my door handle is the one that is going to turn, to hear my students or my colleagues in fear and in pain.  Still, I think every teacher in every school has probably felt that specter of fear run its icy finger down his or her spine from time to time, has thought about what s/he would do if the horror came to him/her.

I don't want to get on any high and unsteady soapbox and point fingers.  I know so many people will be doing that as soon as all the tears dry.  To be honest, I don't even know where to point the fingers.  All I can do right now is cry and pray:  pray for the grieving, pray for the injured and the broken, pray for the lost.  And by that, of course, I am so horribly and terribly afraid that I mean all of us....