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The Arkansas School Shootings
Originally
published in the Houston Chronicle
Spanish translation
AGAIN
and again we have heard people from a small town in Arkansas - or in Kentucky,
or in Mississippi - say how shocked they are that "something like
this" could happen. We have all said it. We have all felt it. "If
only we had known," the mayor of Jonesboro, Ark., said, "If
anyone had had any reason to believe something like this was possible,
they would have prevented it."
The sad truth is, we had every reason to believe that "something
like this" could happen. It has already happened many times this
year in America, and it's barely springtime. What's more, we have every
reason to believe that it will happen again - and yet again, in our community,
in your community, in any community in America. And not just because of
the "copy cat" effect.
The victims of the Jonesboro assault were all female. Young girls. Women.
And the boys who methodically gunned down those girls and those women
were only acting out their own version of an all-too frequent story in
America. The only difference is that they were a little bit younger than
the men who go to Home Depots and post offices and work sites across the
country to murder and harass their girlfriends or their ex-girlfriends
or their wives. It was not children the copycats were copying. It was
adults.
Where did those little boys in Arkansas get the beliefs that enabled them
to think it was OK to shoot those little girls and women? They didn't
get them from space aliens. They got them from radio, from television,
from songs, from movies, from older boys and men, from every man who said
something degrading to a woman, every man who has molested a little girl,
every commentator who has denounced women as "feminazis" if
they dare to call for an end to the violence. They were acting out the
same belief system that perpetuates and escalates violence against women
and girls everywhere.
Isn't it time we sent a better message to our children, our boys, our
men, ourselves?
In Arkansas, our sons prepared for war, amassing their arsenal. They put
on camouflage. Then, locked and loaded, they went out and chose their
terrain and identified the enemy.
Girls. Women.
Ask yourself this: Who taught them to identify the enemy, let alone who
taught them to fire guns with such deadly accuracy, to put on camouflage
and plan an assault? Had they pretended to kill women in target practice?
How did women (or girls) become the enemy? One of the boys was reportedly
angry because somebody didn't want to be his girlfriend. That hardly seems
grounds for assault, much less wholesale slaughter, but in fact women
are killed routinely for no better reason (over 1,000 female victims of
gender war in Texas alone in the '90s). According to The Dallas Morning
News, a woman is battered every 9 seconds.
In Arkansas, a woman named Shannon Wright died trying to save those little
girls. Shannon had attended that school herself as a child. She had gone
to college and got her degree and come back to teach the rising generation.
Surely she saw herself in those children being gunned down. And so she
stepped in front of one of the girls and took the bullets meant for her.
America has never produced a greater hero.
If Shannon Wright could see herself in the children she died trying to
save, do we dare have the moral courage to see ourselves in her? To follow
her example and step between little girls and women (who are at risk every
day in our community) and their abusers? To put our whole being on the
line the way she did, in order to say, "Stop the violence"?
To call men to accountability and insist that they hold themselves responsible
for their actions?
When grown men assault women they claim to love, I ask myself: Where were
the other men in this man's life? Where were his brothers, his elders,
his mentors? After Jonesboro, I wonder how many Shannon Wrights have to
die before men are willing to do their work.
See also If Anger Were the Problem, an essay
on violence in the schools originally published in Teaching Tolerance. |
rebelangel
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by David Vest
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