Another School Shooting

Another school shooting, this time in Cleveland, and another one thwarted in suburban Philadelphia, a town not too far from where I grew up. These tragic events, made all the more profoundly tragic because of the age of those involved, should alert us as a culture to examine where and how we are going so very wrong. But instead, we are focused on Brittany Spear's tailspin, culminating in her children, rightfully so, being taken away from her. And whether or not J.Lo is pregnant--which it seems she is, something I learned while standing in line at a market this morning.

Adolescence sucks, period. I don't think any of us don't bear some of the scars from this hormonal, awkward period of our childhood. This fraught age is made all the more impossible if you are a child who stands out, for whatever reason. I can remember one small, bespectacled boy in my school, who was teased mercilessly by boys and girls--I admit I was one of his torturers. As children, we, at least for me, were just relieved to have found someone else as the prey in this game of catch and torture, so that we become, despite what good kids we are underneath, one of the herd who joins in the fracas in making one child's life a complete misery. It's not right, but it is what happens in childhood.

These games of childhood are damaging, but are they any more damaging today than they were 20 or 30 years ago? What's changed in our world that those who are tortured then turn to violence as a way to avenge the years of torment suffered at the hands of other children? I know the boy in my school must have had murderous thoughts about us all, rightfully so. And whether he had voodoo dolls of each of us in his room is up for conjecture. I do know he suffered in silence until he was able to graduate, heading off to college and a life, I hope, that was less painful. I've never attended a high school reunion, and so I have no idea whether he's ever come back to face those of us who had gone out of our way to let him know we thought he was a complete loser--which he wasn't. He was simply odd, which in childhood could spell disaster for any well adjusted child.

The shock we, the news media fueled, as a country expresses each time something like this happens is too soon forgotten as we go on with our lives. As a mother of a boy--most of the shooters are male, and not always Caucasian, as in the case of the Virginia Tech rampage--I can't help but worry about how to make sure my son's adolescent anger, something predetermined, doesn't turn into violence directed at himself or others. Parents of young children are filled with hope and expectation for their child. None of us can imagine our own child turning into a tragic news column. It simply goes beyond our comprehension. Yet, I imagine, each of the parents of those boys, whose lives and deaths are forever connected to a news tag line, never imagined their child's life turning out quite that way, not when their child had been four, five, playing and obsessed with those things four and five year olds fixate.

Yet, each of these lives did take a turn. And how are we not discussing, or thinking, about how we have gotten to this place where a murderous school rampage has occurred at all, but simply has occurred in, yet, another suburban town? Have we become so inured to violence in general that a school shooting in a high school, an age where a child should only be worried about how or when they're going to lose their virginity, their future spread out in front of them with all the possibilities and limitations of every life, is every day?

It sickens me to learn about each of these killers, kids so tormented they saw no way out. I can't imagine the pain experienced by parents and siblings they've left behind, those now left to bear the loss of their son or brother, but also the shame of what they had done. And then my mind wanders to those kids who were there, those who have survived such a horrific event--it is too unbearable to think about kids so young now having the mark of fear, which will surely be the real shadow in their lives and futures.