These are my students.
Well, these are my students from last year. As Teach For America is a two-year commitment, I've had two years' worth of kids. This photo is from last year's eighth grade graduation at York West End Junior High School, a K-12 school in York, Alabama. Look, I have lived in Alabama all my life, and never knew York was a real thing until I worked there for a year. It's real. It's right here:
See, that there is Mississippi, and that there is Tuscaloosa. And riiiiight in the middle (well, kind of), you have it: York, Alabama.
The point is, I've gotten to know about 150 students ranging from 7th grade to 10th grade for the past year and a half. They have carved out a place in my heart. And when I say that, I mean that I truly have less heart than when I started. Actually, sometimes I think I've generated a whole new TFA-only heart -- otherwise, I simply wouldn't be up to snuff to do the job. And as a teacher who cares, it's a big job.
When the Newtown shootings took place on Friday of last week, like many of us, a few questions began their journey floating through my mind. Why did this happen? What are we going to do about it? Will this be a season of impassioned speeches and unfulfilled promises?
But the question one that stopped me in my tracks came from my roommate. My roommates (who also Teach for America - the majority of whom, actually, teach children in K, 1st, and 2nd grades, respectively) and I had been watching coverage of the tragedy for probably more time than we should have been. I left the room for a minute and came back to one of my roommates crying on the couch.
"What is it?" I said (a dumb question, considering).
"It just hit me," she said, shaking her head. "They keep saying, 'We can't believe it happened here. You'd never think a thing like this could happen in a town like ours.' And I just realized...what would they say if this had happened at one of our schools?"
It's a fair point she made. What would they say? I think I can guess.
"It was only a matter of time." "This was bound to happen sooner or later." "Of course it happened at that school."
You know, the folks who really get me in times like these are the ones who posit seemingly innocuous statements like, "One day, we'll understand why this happened," or, "In the fullness of time, God will use this for good somehow." Because the truth is, while those may act as a temporary salve to a kind of bottomless wound, eventually you figure out that the wound is bottomless. We peel back the first layer of sentiments like those to realize that if we subscribe to the idea that somehow God planned for twenty 6 and 7 year old kids to be murdered in cold blood, then we have also subscribed to a God who ordains mindless murder and hapless violence.
I do not subscribe to a God like that.
That conversation and this theological question may seem unrelated (and maybe they are), but here's the thread that's binding them for me: why are we waiting on the "fullness of time?" What are we doing to change the answer to my roommate's question? Aren't we the hands and words and deeds of God while we're scrambling around on this planet? It is not acceptable that the students in that photograph up there may never have access to a college simply because of the city or race they were born into. It's not acceptable that people would scoff at a shooting where I teach, wondering why it hadn't happened sooner. It isn't acceptable that we Hail Mary these horrendous, unsolvable problems like Newtown or poverty or educational inequity and just hope for the best; hope that "one day, we'll understand."
Let me be clear about something: I am not equating leaning on and into God as a cop-out. I think that's beautiful, and I think I ought to do more of it. What I am saying is that defaulting to the "part of God's plan" line without any further consideration, may be creating more depth to the sadness from which we are so desperately to escape.
There isn't room for us to take the horrors of the world we live in and make them palatable by using a shield of lazy faith and crossing our fingers. There isn't time. I think we have to start getting a little more uncomfortable than that. We have to start asking ourselves what we're doing to perpetuate a cycle of violence and unfairness.
Know what? I'd like to amend my first sentence. Those students up there? They're not mine. They're yours, too. And we owe them more than a distant promise in the fullness of time.
