Tag: school shootings

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education politics

Jack Straw from Wichita

Jack Sawyer

I wrote a post a few weeks ago arguing in favor of abolishing the age limit on the right to vote. I want to follow up that proposal by arguing in favor of abolishing prison time for people under the age of 25.

Here’s what it means to work at a therapeutic school: never giving up on a child. A lot of the kids we get at our school are on their way down the drain of life. Their parents (or usually at least one of them) have abandoned them. Their schools have either asked them to leave or admitted that they don’t know what to do with them. Their friends have either never appeared or, in almost every instance, rejected them. They’ve been told in ways both verbal and nonverbal that they aren’t worth anything and that no one could ever love them; and like that, dripping wet with the sloppy shit of society’s refuse, they arrive at our door.

And the first thing we tell them is that we will never let them go. We’re like Robin Williams’ character in *Good Will Hunting*: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”

Today, the Vermont State Supreme Court agreed with over a hundred years of state precedent to declare that an 18-year-old boy (from my hometown) who had undeniably taken several positive steps towards enacting a mass shooting at a local school, and despite those undeniable steps, the state could still not hold him without bail.

The finding goes deeper than that, however, because the decision to overturn the lower court’s ruling registers a formal level of doubt regarding the state’s original charges against the boy. Due to legislative reasons and over a hundred years of precedent, to maintain the lower court’s ruling, the justices would had to have found, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the boy *was going to attempt* the shooting; fortunately or unfortunately, the justices were not able to do that.

Now, that same formal level of doubt called for by the justices will be in the instructions given to the jury when the state asks them to convict the boy to prison. But if several justices can’t convict him to be held without bail because all of the available evidence doesn’t support the state’s argument beyond a shadow of a doubt, then a jury shouldn’t be able to convict him of that either.

Essentially, today’s opinion explained all of the reasons why the boy should be declared not guilty: because he did not do the crime with which he is being charged. Faced with the climate that has arisen in this country in the aftermath of Parkland, the state’s prosecutors overreached and charged the boy with something that would make big headlines in terms of the story —— maybe not necessarily for selfish publicity, but maybe as a kind of warning to other potential shooters; unfortunately, they charged him with a crime that he, in all good conscience, did not commit. He did not yet *attempt* the mass murder; he had taken steps toward it, but there were plenty of steps left for him to take, and he was capable of changing his mind, for whatever reason, at any moment. He truly is not guilty of the crime for which is being charged.

But that’s not to say that this young boy belongs on the streets. In their ruling, the Justices suggested that, even if he did make bail, the lower court could reasonably keep him under watch for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which, while not being prison, still registers in a real and formal way the Justices’ specific distrust of the boy.

This boy is eighteen years old. I know next to nothing about him except for what I’ve read in the papers, read in his journal (which he titled, “Journal of an Active Shooter”), and what people have said about him around town. I’ve never met him and I don’t know his family, but by all accounts, including his own, whatever caused him to want to do this had nothing to do with his family.

This is a boy who, for whatever reason, is sick, and he needs some real help. We — the real human beings who make up our community (town, county, state, nation, earth) — need to step in and give him some help, if not with our hands and hearts, than at least with our tax dollars (which ought to be considered just another way of saying “our charitable donations”).

We don’t need to exile this boy. He is eighteen years old. Everything we read and everything we see tells us that adolescence lasts longer and longer. This is not just a cultural reality; it’s become a biological reality. Americans reach puberty at earlier and earlier ages, and they’re dependent upon their parents for longer and longer amounts of time. Adolescence is no longer just the teenage years. It extends from 10 or 11 all the way to 23 or 25, and sometimes even longer. There’s a reason the Affordable Care Act gave children the right to stay on their parents’ health insurance for longer: today’s kids are dependents for longer.

This boy is eighteen years old. He’s not an adult. Just because we, as a society, can put a gun in his hand and send him off to war, that doesn’t make him an adult. It makes him young and vibrant and able to fight and march for longer periods of time than people who are in their thirties and forties. It makes him less attached to the next generation of kids and less burdened by mature responsibilities. We don’t send 18 year olds to war because they’re adults; we send them exactly because they’re *not* adults.

No one who is eighteen years old ought to go to prison for life, and I’m not sure they ought to be sent there at all. Prison is exile. Prison is society saying it’s done with you. Prison is saying, quite explicitly, “It *is* your fault.”

I want to make it clear that everything I say for this eighteen year old white boy from rural Vermont stands true for the eighteen year old black boy from urban California. Eighteen year old kids should not be sent into social exile, I don’t care what color their skin is, what societies they grew up in, or what their crime was.

Eighteen year old brains are still in development — socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically — in ways that twenty-five year old brains are not. They are, in all instances, still works in progress, and they ought never to be abandoned.

This is not to say that this boy — or the eighteen year old frat boy who rapes a girl on campus, or the eighteen year old black boy who stabs a grocer for his cash, or the eighteen year old Latino boy who murders his girlfriend in a fit of rage, or the eighteen year old Asian girl who smashes her guitar into a club owner’s face — ought to be free. I think it is completely fair for society to tell these children that their behavior will not be tolerated and that their judgement cannot be trusted, and to then remand these individuals to a place of socially provided care where they can receive food, shelter, therapeutic treatment, and both a liberal and a specialized education. And it ought to also say to them, at every instance, “It was not your fault.”

Will Hunting was worth saving not because he was a genius, and not because he was white. He was worth saving because he was just a kid.

And so is the boy who wrote, “The journal of an active shooter,” who had recently purchased a shotgun and documented his plan to purchase both an AR-15 and a deadly handgun, and, on top of that, had documented the ever-approaching dates for when he planned to carry out the shooting.

Because as guilty as he is of planning to commit mass murder, it is still, at bottom, not his fault, and more than anything, we need to show him, in every way possible, that we are here to help.

XXX

Nihilism. That’s what we are fighting.

John Goodman had it right: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

Nihilism feels no connection to anything, and it has no answer to the problem of suicide. If nothing matters, you don’t matter and I don’t matter, and then what’s the matter with a little mass shooting before I check out, you know, just for the thrill of it; plus, think of the publicity!?

Everyone who is not a nihilist knows that that way of thinking, that way of feeling, is wrong. We don’t even need to be convinced of it, and frankly, we’re a bit scared of people who feel that we ought to be convinced it, as if there were some plausible reason we ought to doubt it.

Of course walking into a room full of people and shooting them without mercy and without even really any passionate sense of anger is wrong. Of course it is. Why would anyone want to even discuss it, except to maybe make a joke (because, hey, for real, even jokes about school shootings can be funny)?

Arguments in favor of nihilism serve no point — literally, they are *in service* to nothing, to non-existence, to the real and true sense of an absence in the face of an everything.

It’s like pointing behind you at a giant emptiness and screaming at everyone in front of you, “Look at that! Don’t you see!?” and we follow your finger to find *the point* and we don’t see anything at all. And you say, “Yes! Yes! That’s the point!”

At which point, most of us turn to look at each other, and in each other’s faces we see, you don’t understand it all.

“Come here, my child. It’s not your fault. Society hasn’t done a good enough job with you yet. You’re still a work in progress. And you still deserve nothing less than our love.”

XXX

The name of the school where I work is based on the idea that a child is like a gemstone of jade and that society ought to be like a jade carver. Faced with any individual piece of jade, a jade carver knows she cannot bring any intention to the stone other than to help it become a socially-pleasing version of itself, something that other people can look at and allow themselves to be amazed by. If the carver tries to make the stone anything other than what it seems to want to be, the jade will crack and all of its potential will be lost, its destiny to now become less than what it oought to, by its own accounts, have become.

As the adults in a place where society sends its most challenging children, we do what everyone else has refused to do — we let the child become the adult he or she wants to be, and we do it while being caring, trusting, challenging, and non-threatening in every way we can imagine.

My school would not be able to handle the boy who has been accused of attempting to commit mass murder. Our model depends on trust, and this boy has demonstrated he cannot yet be trusted.

But I hope that there is a place where the spirit of our model can thrive while keeping the children within it wholly contained, much like the way plants can thrive despite being kept within a properly maintained and properly cared-for greenhouse.

My school is more like a raised-bed garden: there’s some structure, sure, but it tries to stay as open to nature as possible — which means it also lays itself open to attack.

My school couldn’t foster a nihilistic weed without choking off the oxygen to a garden’s worth of other plants. If the weed is going to be *allowed* to grow, it will need to be kept in its own roomy and healthy pot — until, that is, it can evolve into something else, something capable of existing within the larger ecosystem of the garden.

(Sure, I murdered the metaphor, but that doesn’t make it any less true).

Just because my school can’t handle him doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve all the positive things my school’s model can do for him, and I sincerely hope the state considers caring for him in my school’s specific kind of way.

To want anything less for this boy — or for any child convicted at his age — is to live a life without a sense of mercy, and for anyone who lives life like that, I simply feel sorry, because true mercy — *Jesus-level* mercy — is a beautiful sense for each of our spirit’s to feel.

May society help this boy’s — and all accused children’s — still-forming spirit to heal.

Categories
life politics

Black Panther, Liberals, Parkland Teens, and You

One of my students, a young African-American woman, is fired up about the new Black Panther movie, but not in the way you might think. Unlike Shaun King, a well-known activist and African-American writer who “sincerely place[s] it on the level of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the birth of hip-hop, and the election of Barack Obama,” my young African-American student thinks Black Panther is trash.

I don’t want to white-mansplain her particular argument, so I’ll leave the details to her.

Instead, what I want to talk about is her existence and its relationship to Shaun King’s.

First, some context for this post.

I have another student, a young white male, who believes he is the only truly conservative person at our school. He calls us “a school full of liberals,” and he basically disdains everything we say, discounting our knowledge and our advice because we are, as he says, “liberals.”

His attitude is familiar, I’m sure. It’s the attitude that sneers the word “liberal.” It’s also (in a different way) the attitude that sneers the word “redneck.”

This attitude is born from a mindset that feels too comfortable with labels, so comfortable, in fact, that the person is not even aware they’re using them. Unfortunately, a label doesn’t do anything except provide us with permission to stop thinking.

By labeling all of his teachers as “liberals,” my “only truly conservative” student gives himself permission to not be challenged by the ideas he encounters in school. Instead of allowing new ideas to enter into his mind, he erects a barrier — a wall, if you will — to prevent all our “liberal” ideas from getting in. As you might imagine, such a strategy does not a great student make.

By any measure, my white male student would call both my African-American student and Shaun King, the African-American writer, liberals. Both argue that society has a role to play when it comes to fighting injustice, and they both prefer using progressive, radical, or even revolutionary means if necessary. In short, they are both activist soldiers in the war against oppression.

But by labeling them both as “liberals,” my white male student remains blind to the areas in which they differ, their feelings about Black Panther being just one of them.

When we paint over people with such a wide brush, we smear away everything that makes us individuals, and because of that, we lose the opportunity to engage with each other’s truly unique minds.

This is part of what the kids in Florida, and some of the kids in my own school, are trying to get across when they talk to us adults. The kids are dying, and they’re telling us, finally and firmly, to put down our labels, stop being so petty, and start actually listening to one another.

The Parkland shooting reminded us that we are living through another 9/11. And like 9/11, now is not the time to be divided.

—

But unlike 9/11, this wound is self-inflicted.

According to the CDC, the suicide rate among teenage girls doubled between 2005 and 2015, while the suicide rate for boys increased 30 percent over the same period (and is roughly three times higher than girls in the first place). Suicides across the whole population, meanwhile, increased 24-percent over a 15 year period (the rate of suicide is highest among middle-aged white men, by the way).

School shootings, we must remember, are often just another form of teen suicide.

In all the conversations about guns and security, we’re missing the bigger picture.

It’s not mental health. “Mental health” is just a red herring that will distract us from committing our resources in the right locations. Black women suffer from depression far greater than any other group in our population, and they are the least likely to seek professional help for it, yet black women are not committing these crimes against our schools, nor are they committing suicide at rates greater than the rest of the population. If “mental health” was the culprit, we’d see a lot less angry white boys on our screens and a lot more depressed black girls.

The culprit is whatever is causing the increase in suicides among teens. We could argue about its identity all day, but doing so would again stop us from seeing the bigger picture.

It’s time to talk to your kids, people. Time to look them in the eye, ask them how they are, and then listen.

And if you know a kid whose parents definitely won’t be doing that, then know that the rest of us are counting on you. You are the representative of the rest of us. Help us by helping that young, emotionally abandoned kid.

And then, after you’ve done it once, do it again, and again, and again, and don’t stop doing it until you know the kid is going to be okay. Because more than guns, more than “mental health,” it will be the helping, caring adult who will stop this.

If we can’t come together on gun control, can we at least come together on that?

And hey, if you don’t quite feel up to it, then at least take the kid to go see Black Panther. Because unlike my student, I thought it was a kick ass movie.

Categories
life politics religion & atheism

The Path to the Dark Side

I’m trying to understand the other side of the argument. I truly am. I don’t believe that any sane person can witness the latest carnage of school children and say the status quo is acceptable.

Which means every sane person agrees that *something* has to change.

I can only imagine three outcomes to the current national debate. The first is to put armed officials in and around our schools to defend the students against all attackers. The second is to put meaningful restrictions on the right of American citizens to bear arms. The third is some combination of the two.

I think most sane people would agree that, regardless of which outcome our elected representatives decide upon, we need to make further changes if we’re to create a meaningful reduction in *attempted* schoolhouse shootings.

Because this is not just about whether we should or should not restrict the private ownership of guns. It’s also about whatever it is that creates angry, young, white men.

I’m not talking about the stereotypical Trump voter or the horrifying rise of white nationalism (which, for the record, is horrible because, in this nation, whites already possess the majority, so all white nationalism can do is further oppress the oppressed, as opposed to black nationalism, which is more about a rising up, rather than a pushing down, but I digress…).

I’m talking about the angry, young, white men who sit back and strategize the optimum method for murdering their peers, and then have the discipline and wherewithal to follow through with their plan.

These are not children acting on a whim.

Last week, in my hometown, the police arrested an angry, young, white man for attempted aggravated murder, attempted first-degree murder, and attempted aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He had been planning for weeks, if not months, to go into his former high school and just start shooting. He was not arrested on his way to do the act. He had let his plan slip to some of his peers, and he called an old classmate of his who happened to be in the Parkland school last week when the shooting happened, and he asked her to describe to him in detail exactly what happened in the school. It was partly based on this phone call, and because an observant mother of one of his peers, that the boy was arrested before he could act.

The boy confessed to planning the massacre, and he told the police there wasn’t anything they could do to stop it. If he got out of jail, he was going to try again.

Right now, the motive seems shady at best — there may have been some bullying, but it’s not exactly clear from the public evidence — but it’s not even the motive that I want to talk about.

It’s the planning. We saw it at Columbine, at Newtown, and at Parkland. It’s the weeks and months of planning.

These things take time. They take price comparisons for weapons, repeated forays for target practice, and pages and pages of writings or hours and hours of video.

But it’s not just the planning. It’s that moment, weeks or months prior, when they decide they’re going to plan. What was perhaps once a flight of fancy becomes a conscious and deliberate plan.

Why?

The flight of fancy comes, I think, from the media. I don’t doubt that violent movies and violent video games give us permission to more vividly imagine our most violent thoughts, thoughts provoked by current and past events in our collective history, which allows perhaps once forbidden thoughts to become palatable to our moral sensibilities, themselves shaped by generational changes in the processes of parenting, education, and the worship of religion.

But none of those things cause a flight of fancy to suddenly transform into a conscious and deliberate plan.

So what does? What makes imaginary violence turn real?

In one short story I wrote for grad school, my angry, young, white, male protagonist dragged a white pregnant woman guns-a-blazing into a hospital where he forced a doctor to oversee the birth of the woman’s child, all while fighting off a swat team of police. When the child is born with black skin, the protagonist looks at the woman disappointingly, then shoots the baby in the face.

(PS: My advisor that semester was black, and I valued his opinion immensely).

There’s a lot of psychology in that story (especially when I think back to how much of it was written on a whim), but at no point during or after the writing of that story have I ever worried about whether I would enact such violence. The very notion of it is unthinkable to me, despite my ability to imagine it in emotionally resonant detail.

Why did my objectively horrible flight of fancy not turn into a conscious and deliberate plan? What, in my own upbringing, did my family, my society, my culture get right?

It wasn’t respect. My style of conversation can be incredibly disrespectful, turning sharp and personal in sometimes selfishly obtuse ways, and I’m not immune to lashing out physically at those who annoy me.

It wasn’t hard work either. Ask anyone, I’m among the laziest people they know.

It wasn’t discipline. I disobeyed my mother and father plenty during childhood, and I continue to disobey them in many ways today. The detentions and in-school suspensions I received in high school didn’t deter me from doing the same things over and over. The failing grades, the high-interest credit cards, the obscene student loan debt — there’s virtually no discipline here.

But something, *something,* stops me from turning my violent flights of fancy into a conscious and deliberate plan.

It’s not fear. As an atheist, I like to think of myself as relatively impervious to fear. Oh, there’s anxiety galore, but anxiety is not fear. As a child who grew up with an insane phobia of dogs, I’ve known true fear, and fear does not stop me from turning violent thoughts into violent actions.

So what is it?

Whatever it is. That’s what we need to work on in our children.

We don’t need to remove violent video games or stop production on violent movies. Rap, punk, heavy metal: none of them can cause a child to deliberately plan and carry out a massacre. Our ability to imagine violence is not the problem, and if we remove it from our media, all we’ll do is perpetuate oppression, violence being a sometimes necessary response to oppression, and thus being sometimes necessary to imagine.

Nor do we need to put God back in the schools. I live my existence without the fear of God and without the lived sense of His mercy, and yet still, I don’t plan and deliver a hellfire of violence upon the innocents of the world. God may be good, but He’s not good for everybody; whatsmore, He’s definitely not necessary.

So what is it then? What do we need to change in these angry, young, white men? They don’t need more respect, more discipline, more fear, or more God, and they don’t need to reduce their consumption of violent media. None of those things are required to *not* turn their flights of fancy into real, deliberate violence.

But what is?

The answer is so simple I didn’t even notice it until now, even though I’ve shared posts about all throughout the past week.

We simply need to turn angry, young, white men into plain young, white men.

Stop the anger, and you stop the massacre of the innocents.

Categories
education life politics

An Argument About Guns

I argue on Facebook a lot. I’m *that* guy. You got an opinion on something? Let’s start arguing, see where it takes us.

I have principles and values that I attempt to defend, but I don’t get angry if someone attacks them. After all, if they can’t stand up to an attack, then maybe they’re not worth defending.

One of my principles is that guns create deadly violence. They are not the only weapons to do so, but they are — in fact and deed — manufactured to create deadly violence. It may not be violence to a human being, but it is violence to a target, whatever that target may be.

The absence of guns, however, does not mean the absence of violence. Violence is a by-product of nature, and nature is everywhere and for all time, therefore, the potential for violence can never reach absolute zero.

I accept this.

What I do not accept is the idea that adding a weapon to any situation will actually reduce *the potential* for deadly violence. The presence of a weapon *threatens* violence, regardless of whether the weapon is used. It increases, in every instance, the potential for deadly violence.

This is not an opinion. I understand it as a statement of fact, one hardly worth defending, since it seems so rock steady and impervious.

I do, however, note potential cracks, areas where, while suffering a direct attack, my pillar of an argument may — in fact and deed — require my direct support.

The constructing of an argument is the concentration of diverse forces upon a central point, and just as in the construction of a bridge, where the best way to channel forces is through a series of triangles, the best way to construct an argument is to triangulate a central point. That means one side of the argument must address the forces marshaled in favor of a counterargument.

The central point of my argument is that guns create deadly violence, but the counterargument I addressed defends the thesis that guns do not create *the potential* for violence.

I have committed the fallacy of a straw-man argument. Not even the biggest gun proponent would defend the position that guns do not create *the potential* for violence; instead, and more reasonably, they argue that guns are the best answer to *actual* violence.

And in that, we differ.

There will be another school shooting and dozens of children and teachers will die. We live in a violent world, and school shootings are one manifestation of that violence. I accept that.

But gun proponents do not think I ought to accept that. They believe that they truly cherish every *innocent* life, and they want to defend that *innocent* life with everything they’ve got. I respect that.

But I do not think it is possible to defend every innocent life.

We live in nature, and nature is a violent place that we can never escape. It *creates* in us the potential for violence in the same way that it *creates* in us the oxygen that keeps our bodies alive. The potential for violence is a condition of our *being*, the ground state of our existence.

That is why I argue about reducing the *potential* for violence; because we can never get *actual* violence to zero. Gun proponents, to their credit, argue about reducing *actual* violence, and they refuse to accept their failure.

I would like to respect and support both positions, but I cannot accept a reality in which there is never any failure.

I do not believe in utopia. I do not believe in perfection. This is a byproduct of my not believing in God. Because I do not believe in God, I am not required to defend any *one* position as perfect.

Christians believe in a triangular God because they believe that talking about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit best allows them to concentrate the weight of their wisdom on one central and holy principle: a single, perfect God. They believe that God’s righteous anger, as well as His infinite mercy, reveals the way we ought to live in moments small and large, and that this revelation is experienced through the grace of His Holy Spirit.

I don’t very much disagree with them; but in the end, I only accept their argument as wisdom, and not as fact.

Because I do not accept the existence of a single, perfect God, I do not have to accept any idea of perfection as a possible fact. I do not believe in nor feel I ought not to strive for the creation of perfection.

Instead, I believe in and feel I ought to strive for the best way to improve the potential for love and/or reduce the potential for violence.

That means, in this instance, I strive to reduce, while knowing we can never eliminate, the *threat of violence* to our school children.

Any positive argument I make from this position is therefore unacceptable to gun proponents, and perhaps it ought to be. With them, I am not willing to accept *actual* violence befalling my own child, or the children I teach each day, or my own wife, or the children she teaches each day. With them, I want our schools to be *free* from actual violence, and with them, I don’t deny that guns are perhaps the best way to confront *actual* violence.

But we can never free every child from *the potential* for violence, and so that’s where I choose to put my effort — to reduce *the potential* rather than to stop *the actual* (which, in all instances, we will *never* be able to do).

I do not believe that putting guns in our schools will actually reduce the potential for violence.

I can imagine, because we see it happen every day, armed authority figures killing *actually* innocent men and boys. It will be a single story on the news, perhaps lasting a month at most (depending on the circumstances), and then the authority figure(s) will be suspended, fired, and perhaps even convicted, and the story will go away.

And then, maybe a month or two later, an armed authority figure will kill a single armed shooter, preventing the body count in one attack from rising any higher (though almost definitely not reducing it to zero). The story will be incredible for its real and actual heroism, and the number of proponents for removing the guns from our schools will reduce.

And then another *actually* innocent man or boy will be killed, and the authority figure will be suspended, fire, or convicted. And then another, and then another, and then perhaps another school shooter will be stopped by an official’s gun.

And that will just become our reality.

The number of school shootings by armed and angry boys will eventually reduce, but never equal zero, and yet still, unencumbered, the number of dead *actually* innocent kids gunned down by armed authority figures will go on and on, and because the school shooters keep coming, even if in drastically reduced numbers, no positive argument will be heard that suggests removing the armed authority figures from the school will actually make every school shooter stop.

And actually innocent children will continue to die.

That cannot be helped. I don’t care how many guns you throw at the problem.

Gun proponents envision a future where every child accepts the presence of guns in both their personal and their public lives, but in that instance, the child becomes *conditioned* to a reality where there exists a drastically high potential for violence — violence in self-defense, perhaps, but still, and always, violence.

But I’m trying to envision a future where every child and every adult thinks of schools as sacrosanct. Shooters won’t stay away because they are afraid. They will stay away because of respect.

I teach in a school for students who have been diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disorders. Many of them have been expelled from other schools because their presence increased the potential for violence. The state does not know what to do with these kids, and so they send them to us.

Our entire school is based on the concept of respect. We respect the students, and in return, we expect them to respect us. They often don’t. But our response never changes. In this one place, they are not required to earn or maintain our respect. We simply give it to them. Every day. All day. Regardless of what they do. And through that experience, the students *witness*, every day, all day, what it means for one person to respect another, and we hope, through that experience, they learn to respect the place that we’ve built, and maybe, if we’re lucky, the people who continue to build it.

I don’t worry about any of my students coming to my school to shoot us up, and mine are the students virtually every other school is worried about.

I don’t worry about them because I trust they know I respect them.

Most gun proponents I have spoken with make a big deal out of respect, and rightfully so. But one does not earn respect by threatening someone with violence; a threat can only earn their fear.

The worst thing that could happen at my school is for an armed authority figure to show up. The state has sent these kids, over the course of their short lifetimes, to residential facilities that, in the minds of these kids, are little better than jails. They’ve been thrown to the ground and forcibly restrained by adults. Many of them have been handcuffed and taken to an actual jail.

To these kids, authority figures are, for very valid reasons, just triggers to a post-traumatic episode — sources of anxiety, anger, and fear.

We work to socialize our students to authority figures, but we also respect the experiences that they’ve gone through, not seeing in them any reason for blame or judgement, just respecting them for who they are and what they’re experiencing now.

We are able to do this because the discussions we have in our professional-development workshops value therapy above academic achievement. While it is true that we are a school, we believe that teaching them about respect, acceptance, anger, and coping will do them more good than teaching them to do their sums. We strive to provide them with skills for communications, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and social reasoning, but the primary focus is on the development of their personal qualities.

The students we traditionally receive have been so disobedient that they’ve, in almost all cases, been literally beat down by their families and society. Many of them have never known, since the moment they were born, a moment free from anxiety, fear, and pain.

They do not need to be *further conditioned* to a reality with a high potential for violence. They do not need to worry *more* that their disobedience may result in their death. That is already the only existence they’ve ever known.

I beg you, as a man who spends virtually every waking hour thinking about how to help the broken children in our communities, do not put armed authority figures in our schools.

Help me teach these children that, before anything else, and just because they are alive, they deserve our respect.

Because that is the only thing that will ever bring us closer to actually reducing the violence.

(Which, I accept, we can never reduce to zero.)

Categories
education politics

Teacher Advocates “Students, Go On Strike.”

PARKLAND, FL - FEBRUARY 14: People are brought out of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooting at the school that reportedly killed and injured multiple people on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, Florida. Numerous law enforcement officials continue to investigate the scene. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Let’s not bullshit anyone. I’m the teacher in the headline and I’m advocating that every student in the United States go on strike until Congress takes decisive action on the issue of school shootings.

I am not advocating for one position or another. I do not have the solution.

But it’s not my job to come up with the solution. It’s the job of our Senators and Representatives in Congress. This is exactly what we sent them to Congress to do.

School shootings are a national problem. They are not a local problem or a state problem. They are a national problem, and there is only one place in America with the authority to address a national problem. It’s not Hollywood or New York City or even Fairfax, Virginia. It’s Washington D.C.

We send representatives to Washington D.C. to work together to address and solve the problems that beset us all. We understand that there will be disagreements as to a proper solution, and that the system will be corrupted by the current state of human nature, but we are also willing to accept the results of the American democratic process. We may not like the results, and we may continue to fight to improve them or change them, but we’ll also accept them.

But before we can get results, we need to have an open and honest debate, where all the cards are on the table and people of good will can persuade other people of good will to form a majority in favor of a specific solution or set of solutions and where the minority also accepts the solution (begrudgingly if need be) and neglects to force the majority to form a supermajority.

I say this knowing full well that the Republican National Party holds a majority of seats in Congress and that the platform of that party is antithetical to my values on virtually every issue, including this one, but I also say it knowing that this particular issue is one where every American truly wants their Congressperson to vote their conscience.

If every Congressperson is able to speak honestly and openly about their feelings and thoughts on this one issue, and every American, regardless of their party affiliation or their employer, is willing to accept that Congressperson’s position as, at the very least, open and honest, then I believe their vote on this particular issue would not dampen their ability to run for re-election. It would, regardless of which way they voted, do the opposite.

When people talk about being sick of the politicians, what we mean is that we’re sick of the liars. We don’t want our representatives to vote a certain way because it will help them keep their job. We want them to vote a certain way because they believe in it. It’s not their job to run for office. It’s our job to determine whether we want someone with their beliefs to represent us in Congress.

The politicians need to stop running for re-election and start doing the job we sent them there to do: use their conscience to do what they think is best.

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More than any other public institution, schools should be a refuge from danger. They are where virtually every parent in the community sends their children for the majority of the work day. Yes, schools have other priorities, but they are also, and maybe primarily, our daycare.

Not one parent — whether they are an NRA member or a member of MoveOn.org — wants to go to work every day worried about receiving a phone call notifying them of the death of their child. As parents, we can deal with phone calls about suspensions and expulsions. We can deal with drug convictions, special education restrictions, sick days, a teacher’s concern about a lack of homework, the fact that our child has been bullying someone, whatever.

What we can’t handle is the phone call that tells us our child is dead.

If we trust schools with anything, we trust them with that.

But now we can’t, and we haven’t been able to for a long time. We now know, and we’ve known for a while, that our schools have become the most vulnerable institutions in our communities — the one public space where deranged individuals can do the most damage.

The politicians in Washington D.C. are afraid of this issue, and for good reason: there is no  answer that will satisfy everyone, and there’s a lot of money at stake when it comes to this particular issue. These politicians don’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole, not the ones who are there now.

More than anything, the lack of movement on this issue reveals our representatives’ inability to do the one job we sent them to Washington to do: participate in an open and honest debate and at the end of the day, vote their conscience.

If they are unable to do that, they should all, regardless of party, be replaced. Failure to move the ball on this one issue should cost them their seat, and they ought to stake their future on that.

Every student in every school in every Congressional district in the United States ought to stay home from school until their elected representative pledges to move the ball on this issue before the November election, and the students should continue to stay out of school until the majority and minority leaders agree that, on this one issue, any threat to filibuster or any act of filibustering be staged from the House or Senate floor. If they let the debate be open and honest, then Americans will respect the results.

Failing that, every student ought to refuse to attend school, and every parent in every district in every state in the United States will have to solve the problem of daycare. This will put such a screeching halt to the national economy that Congress will have no choice but to respond.

As a teacher, I hear every day from my students how children have no rights. I try to tell them that as human beings, they always have rights. But as human beings, they’re also vulnerable to having those rights taken away. Which means they have two choices: they can either stand up and fight for their rights, or they can give them away. But no one, no one, can just take their rights away from them.

As a human being on planet earth, you have the right to petition your government for a redress of grievances. The most polite way to do that is to write a letter. The most effective way to do that is to make a lot of noise until the entire head of the government is forced to turn your way and deal with you.

As individuals below the age of 18, you do not have the right to vote. But as human beings, you do have the right to make your voices heard.

As citizens, you also have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — all of which add up to the right to be free from fear.

Every day, your guardians are required by law to send you to an adult-managed place where contemporary events demonstrate your safety cannot be guaranteed, and where your life seems to be increasingly at risk. This should not be acceptable to you.

And you ought to stand up and do something about it.

Right now, to these politicians who refuse do anything about it, your deaths — your lives — don’t matter.

You have to stand up and make them matter. You have to hit these fuckers where it counts: in their wallets.

And by fuckers, I mean every adult who continues to let this happen.

Stop going to school and they’ll have to stop going to work. When they stop going to work, the money dries up. When the money dries up, that’s when adults turn to Washington. Which will mean that those fuckers in D.C. will have to do their jobs while the whole world is watching.

If they’re not able to stand up and vote their conscience then, then they’ll never be able to do it and they won’t be worth the title on their door: Representative.

I hear the liberal/cynical response to this: rich people can pay for daycare, and it’s the rich who are preventing any movement on this issue; all this demonstration will do is hurt poor people. While this may or may not be true, most people’s daycare depends, somewhere, on a low-income parent showing up to do their job. When that low-income parent is unable to find or afford daycare of their own, the pain will trickle uphill.

Meanwhile, the children of rich people ought to use their funds to fight this fight. If they can afford to get themselves someplace where an entire congregation of students can demonstrate, in the most public way possible, that they are, in fact, not going to attend school until this issue is addressed by Congress, then all the better.

Yes, there will be pain felt during this demonstration. There always is. Think of the men and women in the Civil Rights movement: the police dogs, the firehoses, the batons, the nooses. Yes, there will be pain. Single mothers will lose their jobs when they have no options for daycare. Fathers and mothers will scream and fight over who will stay home with the children, and women will be abused over their answers. Children will be beat for disobeying their mothers and fathers, and some will feel the wrath of the belt or the burn of the cigarette, the sting of the hard slap or the collision of the closed fist.

But will it be worth it? Is the right to go to school free from fear worth it?

If you think so, stand up and make your lives matter.

Stand up and go on strike.

I teach in Vermont, where every student goes on a week vacation starting on Monday. Use that week to plan, organize, and publicize. Talk to your parents about it. Let them know it is happening, and be willing to defend your position. If they make you go to the physical school on the Monday after vacation is over, make a sign and picket outside the front door. Get your friends to join you. Have someone call the news. Attract a lot of attention. But be deep and thoughtful. Stay somber. Remember why you’re there. Remember the dead bodies, the dead children, feel the fear of all those children having to run for their lives, the sound of gunfire coming from right behind them, the sight of their friends and teachers bleeding on the ground beside them.

They didn’t deserve that. No one deserves that. Refuse to become a victim.

Stand up. Stand up and go on strike.