I try to start each class with a quote. I hang a new one up on the board each morning when I arrive at school. They come from books that have entertained me with page-turning plots and enlightened me with revelations about the human condition, books that have cheered me up, challenged my beliefs, and captured my imagination. Today the quote was from Abraham Verghese’s brilliant novel Cutting for Stone. “We are all fixing what is broken,” it reads. “It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”
When I read it to my first period class, a room filled with bright and curious ninth graders, I could not make it through the short quote without my voice breaking. I had to stop and regroup so that I did not simply start bawling right there in front of my students.
When I picked out that quote in June, in preparation for this school year, I saw it as uplifting and positive. I read it as words of hope and progress. We are all actively fixing what is broken - advancing gay rights, electing a black president, almost electing a woman, working toward affordable healthcare. Sure, the quote concedes, it is hard work that will not be completed in our lifetime, but handing it off to the next generation is a gesture of both victory and hope. “We need you to take over now,” we will say to our children, “we have made the world better, but there is so much more to do. Keep fighting.”
But this morning the quote sounded hollow. Hollow like the tips of bullets we continue to sell, bragging of their “sophisticated designs that allow for maximum expansion upon impact with a target.” Hollow like the thoughts and prayers offered by our elected officials in place of meaningful legislative reform. Hollow like the rhetoric of the Second Amendment used to justify the sale of semi-automatic weapons and the little trinkets that allow someone to essentially make that weapon fully automatic. When I selected that quote, the idea that “we are all fixing what is broken” was a promise. I see now that, at least as it pertains to guns, it is a lie.
We are not all fixing what is broken. We are helping those whose souls drive them to break. We are handing them their tools of destruction on a silver platter so that gun companies can use fear to drive up stock values and politicians can trade innocent lives for donations from the NRA.
I agree with Jimmy Kimmel that “it feels like someone has opened a window into hell,” and I just can’t stop staring. He is right about it being common sense, about how absurd it is to apply words written by our forefathers to AK-47s and AR-15s. I will let him handle the rhetoric meant to enrage us all into action, even as he concedes we are not likely to act.
I will just try to go back to teaching. Today, that was difficult.
Today, we took a detour from analyzing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird so my students could try to process a tragedy none of us can wrap our brains around. They wanted to talk about what had happened. They wanted to ask questions and offer opinions. They wanted to offer simple solutions that our elected officials are unwilling to enact. I am already dreading the day we have to talk about innocent Tom Robinson being shot seventeen times.
Guns and racism. At least that old book is still relevant today.
After class I took a look at some of the other quotes already hanging on the walls from our first few weeks together. “Be passionate,” Matt Haig writes in his wonderful book The Humans, “As civilization advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.” We cannot, I try to remind my students, allow these shootings to become so commonplace that we react to them with indifference.
John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany reminds us “if you care about something you have to protect it.” I wonder is it possible our so-called leaders care more for the gun lobby than for human life.
“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” Sherman Alexie writes in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, “By black and white. By Indian and White. But I know this isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.”
From Angie Thomas’ The Hate You Give, a question every one of our elected leaders should ask: “What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?”
And finally, another from Abraham Verghese. “God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”
This is not about doctrine. It is not about Democrats and Republicans. It is about common sense.
So. Tomorrow I will face a room full of students again and try to pull their attention away from this tragedy at least for an hour. I will turn us again back to the literature we are studying. I already hung up the quote of the day on my way out this afternoon. It is Atticus, from To Kill a Mockingbird. “The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
When I read it to my first period class, a room filled with bright and curious ninth graders, I could not make it through the short quote without my voice breaking. I had to stop and regroup so that I did not simply start bawling right there in front of my students.
When I picked out that quote in June, in preparation for this school year, I saw it as uplifting and positive. I read it as words of hope and progress. We are all actively fixing what is broken - advancing gay rights, electing a black president, almost electing a woman, working toward affordable healthcare. Sure, the quote concedes, it is hard work that will not be completed in our lifetime, but handing it off to the next generation is a gesture of both victory and hope. “We need you to take over now,” we will say to our children, “we have made the world better, but there is so much more to do. Keep fighting.”
But this morning the quote sounded hollow. Hollow like the tips of bullets we continue to sell, bragging of their “sophisticated designs that allow for maximum expansion upon impact with a target.” Hollow like the thoughts and prayers offered by our elected officials in place of meaningful legislative reform. Hollow like the rhetoric of the Second Amendment used to justify the sale of semi-automatic weapons and the little trinkets that allow someone to essentially make that weapon fully automatic. When I selected that quote, the idea that “we are all fixing what is broken” was a promise. I see now that, at least as it pertains to guns, it is a lie.
We are not all fixing what is broken. We are helping those whose souls drive them to break. We are handing them their tools of destruction on a silver platter so that gun companies can use fear to drive up stock values and politicians can trade innocent lives for donations from the NRA.
I agree with Jimmy Kimmel that “it feels like someone has opened a window into hell,” and I just can’t stop staring. He is right about it being common sense, about how absurd it is to apply words written by our forefathers to AK-47s and AR-15s. I will let him handle the rhetoric meant to enrage us all into action, even as he concedes we are not likely to act.
I will just try to go back to teaching. Today, that was difficult.
Today, we took a detour from analyzing Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird so my students could try to process a tragedy none of us can wrap our brains around. They wanted to talk about what had happened. They wanted to ask questions and offer opinions. They wanted to offer simple solutions that our elected officials are unwilling to enact. I am already dreading the day we have to talk about innocent Tom Robinson being shot seventeen times.
Guns and racism. At least that old book is still relevant today.
After class I took a look at some of the other quotes already hanging on the walls from our first few weeks together. “Be passionate,” Matt Haig writes in his wonderful book The Humans, “As civilization advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.” We cannot, I try to remind my students, allow these shootings to become so commonplace that we react to them with indifference.
John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany reminds us “if you care about something you have to protect it.” I wonder is it possible our so-called leaders care more for the gun lobby than for human life.
“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” Sherman Alexie writes in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, “By black and white. By Indian and White. But I know this isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.”
From Angie Thomas’ The Hate You Give, a question every one of our elected leaders should ask: “What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?”
And finally, another from Abraham Verghese. “God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”
This is not about doctrine. It is not about Democrats and Republicans. It is about common sense.
So. Tomorrow I will face a room full of students again and try to pull their attention away from this tragedy at least for an hour. I will turn us again back to the literature we are studying. I already hung up the quote of the day on my way out this afternoon. It is Atticus, from To Kill a Mockingbird. “The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
Wow, great post.
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