Gail Helen Bremner

Because I’m Not A Poet . . .

Posted on April 25th, 2007 by gail helen.
Categories: Education, Current Events.

I can’t make sense of most tragedies, especially those like what happened at Virginia Tech. I still remember the spring of 1999, when I’d been out of high school for less than a year, and then the shock of seeing those images from Columbine. Watching terrified children, running from the school with their hands above their heads, all I could think was “Oh God, they look like us.” It could have been my high school — all the elements were there, right down to the look of the buildings and the lines between cliques — and I will never be sure why it wasn’t. What was the difference? Did somebody drop the ball, was it bad luck, was it just the bizarre reaction of mentally unbalanced kids to the “normal” pressures of a being a teenager? When you can look at the faces on the news and see the eyes of people you know but have never met, it is impossible to tell yourself “that wouldn’t happen here.” I know that all over this country, people just like me were asking the same questions, and finding the same lack of answers. We’re doing it again now.

But now that I am going to be a teacher, I find these events even more incomprehensible. School should be a place where students don’t have to fear anything — there should never be a time when they feel worthless, powerless, or scared — especially that they might not make it home. School should be a refuge from the world, a place of security, where all the pressures that tell us we’re nothing can’t intrude. I’m saddened that I feel the need to say something so obvious. But schools should be sacred. There should never be a reason, no matter how illogical or irrational, that a student would feel justified taking the lives of his or her classmates, and more than anything, there should never be a reason that students should fear one of their own might do such a thing. I’ll stop now — I’m rambling, which is a sure sign I don’t know what to say.

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