There was outdated brown, squishy carpet underneath my feet when I first heard about the Columbine shooting. It’s odd the details that stay with you after a decade of processing.
I was in college, a bright eyed resident assistant in my resident director’s office, complaining how my overly scheduled academic life was taking over my spirit. (Remember the unabashed self-absorption of college?) And Tracy, my supervisor is barely listening (who can blame her) and mutters, “This is terrible,” as she watches a small TV in the corner of her office.
In my young adult life, I hadn’t listened to much national coverage about gun violence. Local news covering Over the Rhine violence was enough for me. Only two years removed from high school myself at the time, I could not comprehend the magnitude of what had just occurred.
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I was teaching a class at Miami University, exploring the dimensions of race, class, and difference to undergrads. I showed the movie Higher Learning, in which a disturbed student who was prone to teasing, awkwardness, and shame went on a shooting spree at his university. Remy, the shooter in Higher Learning, was a lost soul who only further confused himself by turning to a white supremist group to deal with his isolation. I handed out a follow-up assignment to my class, asking them to consider why Remy ended up committing such violence at a university when, as he states before he takes his own life, all he wanted “was to become an engineer.”
The next day, Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people – five faculty members and 27 students, at Virginia Tech.
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It was my homepage on Facebook that I learned of Christina Taylor Green. It was because of my interest in feminism, girl and women issues, that someone forwarded along the news that a 9 year old girl, who was born on September 11, 2001, who was the only girl on her Little League team, who was just elected to her student council, was fatally shot, along with eight others at a Safeway in Tucson, AZ, while meeting with her Congresswoman.
And while these particular stories have been obsessed and covered and re-thought on their anniversaries (save the Tucson tragedy), comparatively, I find very little coverage about gun violence against communities of color, or disenfranchised populations. Or the poor. Brown. Black.
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My heart breaks at these tragedies, but this isn’t the whole story, is it? These dog-eared tragedies of my life only show spike in media’s interest in violence, not a spike in violence. The shootings are always there. The violence, unfortunately, is a dog under a fancy living room table. Once it a while it shows its tail, but the animal, the movement of violence, is a momentum that has not slowed. And it shows no signs of slowing so long we continue to acknowledge only the violence against the few and ignore the violence on the street corners of so many ordinary neighborhoods.
In a few weeks, I have to give a presentation about Catholic Social Teaching; a talk that explains social justice and what modern ministry means to me, how I personally define love-in-action.
These shootings have been ruminating in my head as I read through the dogma and doctrine of the Catholic faith…doctrines that use words such as “dignity,” “liberation,” “preference for protecting the poor and vulnerable,” and “solidarity.”
What is Catholic social thought in today’s world of violence? Factors of mental illness, accessibility, gun control, public policy are being argued by every media outlet in the nation. What about your social thought? How do you see these tragedies? Do you honestly let yourself feel – or even try to feel – the fear, the enormity of what happened in Arizona? Or do you let yourself feel momentarily and then ask yourself, “What is the world coming to?” before you move on with your evening? How much of the world are you really living in? How much of it do you dismiss?
Western culture, particularly the United States, has a wonderful amnesic quality to our social conscience. We feel momentarily and then we are indifferent because, clearly, there’s nothing we can do for those people who are suffering. Perhaps.
But what about the people suffering who are not in the news, but are still devastated by tragedy? Do we feel for them? More importantly, do we ACT?
Do we disregard the mentally ill only until a national tragedy prompts us to wonder about how we (the norms) deal with THEM (the crazies) and what are we (read: they) doing about it?
What is to be learned about catholic social teaching that teaches us we are one human family, with many of us in privileged of immediate news, media, and communication, but still, we do not believe we are affected by those outside our immediate family unit?
Do we allow our values to breathe new oxygen? Do we allow our beliefs to morph in context to how the world is teaching us (as it always is) to find better ways to respond to one another? Better ways to love?
Is THIS the best I (read: you or we) can do?
Answer that question.
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I think about the parents a lot. Not just of the parents of the victims of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Tucson. I think about the parents of the shooter. I wonder what their lives are like today. If the shame and disbelief ever let up for one moment.
I wonder about the mothers of shooters and how they grieve, dissociate, separate, mourn, and question.
Mostly, I think us; about the United States’ culture. I think about how deeply we hurt, but how very little surprises us anymore. We are horrified by tragedy and then we move on.
Until the next time. And then the cycle repeats itself again.