This morning listened to my son sing “Fire and Rain” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a way that I had never in all these years heard them. These were the songs that defined my generation. I have memories of sitting in the student union of my college campus, happily strumming my guitar, singing both these songs with a lightheartedness, reveling in the camaraderie and the harmonies. But today my son sang them with such reverence and tenderness that made me hear them in all their poignancy and sorrow — “How many deaths will it take till we know, that too many people have died?” In the wake of the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, the rise of authoritarianism and neo-fascism in this country and abroad, the war Putin is waging on Ukraine, it was the sorrow that so needed to be honored and expressed.
I have been so sorrowful for all the parents sending their children off to school each day, perhaps wondering if they will ever see them again, and even more for all the children growing up in such a world where they practice active shooter drills and can only enter their school through one door and metal detectors. Such a different world from my own carefree school days, and even my son’s. But mine was a privileged world. I think of all the children, and parents who saw their children abducted and sent to Indian boarding schools, where they faced physical and sexual abuse to the point of death, and of the those who survived, creating soul wounds whose legacy continues to this day. I think of the Little Rock 9, and their parents, who daily faced harassment and abuse as they courageously integrated the all-white Central High School of Little Rock, Arkansas. I think of the mothers of every African American child in this country whose lives are at risk simply by jogging down the street, hanging an air freshener on their rearview mirror, and simply lying asleep in their beds. I think of the parents separated from their children at the border, hoping for a better life for their children who instead live in crowded cages.
It was days after I first thought of children facing threats simply by going to school that I remembered my own brief experience of that kind of terror. It was May 4, 1970, and I was in high school at Kent State University School. Driving into town that morning, we entered a world that reminded me of photos of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 uprising there – tanks, troops, low-flying helicopters. It seemed a town under siege. Early on that morning, we had to evacuate the building due to a bomb threat. We filed out and filled the practice fields adjacent to the school, in a somewhat jovial mood as we had a chance to get out of class on a beautiful May morning. Yet as our choir director, in his effort to distract us from the real possibility of serious danger, engaged us all in singing upbeat songs, I was also very aware of the hundreds and hundreds of soldiers marching down the street, some of the 20,000 National Guard troops Governor Rhodes had sent to the campus of the same number of students following the burning of the ROTC building on campus a few nights before.
When we were finally allowed back in the building, we were locked in with guards posted at every entrance, so that none of us would try to sneak out to attend the planned noon rally on campus. It was sometime after noon, probably around one, when rumors started flying of shots being fired on campus, and of a sniper on the roof of one of the campus buildings closest to our school. We were herded into the cafeteria, despite its many windows, and told to huddle under the tables. Finally it was decided that the school needed to be evacuated, but only out the farthest back door. I was one of the ones helping all the little children -- we were a K-12 school -- get safely out the back to their awaiting parents’ cars and school buses. When it was our turn to sneak out the back, I only felt a wave of relief as we were safely miles out of town. It was several hours after that we would learn of the “four dead in Ohio.” Those few hours gave me only the slightest taste of what would become a daily background threat in the lives of students and teachers in this country, and what so many living in war zones face without respite.
It was not the first, nor would it be the last, as the ensuing fifty years have only accelerated the pace and the carnage. Ten days after Kent State, two African American students would be killed by police in their dormitory following a racial disturbance and protest on campus. Six years later, a gunman would kill seven students in the library of Fullerton State in California. In 2007, a shooter killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech.
I still remember where I was when I first heard the news of the Columbine shootings in 1999. It was so unbelievable at that time, so shocking. Over twenty years later it has become far too commonplace. I found myself this morning checking the news for what I assumed would be yet another mass shooting.
What have we become, I have been asking myself and others these past few weeks, and yet it seems this has for far too long been our story. For the past several days I have been angry, frustrated, horrified, infuriated by the gun violence in this country, by those who continue to fuel it through their love affair with weaponry, their poisonous hatred, their glory in power; by those who refuse to take steps toward meeting the deep desire of the vast majority in this country who want an end to this madness.
I have been unable to write about any of this until I heard my son sing this morning and his poignant rendering released all the tears and sorrow I have been carrying in my heart. I would have wished a better world for him, he who heard, really heard the words first penned by my generation in both sorrow and in hope that those lyrics might change the heart of a nation. May it be so now.