Abundant Life...

Not in America.

December 16, 2024

My father would have been 78 years old today. I recall him tearing up when he told me how the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012, shook him.

“They were just babies,” were his exact words.

A Vietnam War Veteran, I am sure my father could have never imagined more than the Duck n Cover Drills and the fear of nuclear weapons would infiltrate America’s schools.

Whenever I show the video of those innocent children dutifully obeying authority figures informing them that hiding under the desks, crouching in hallways away from windows, or even shielding themselves with cloth would protect them, my students and I chuckle. But our laughter has a certain hollowness to it. We can’t imagine that innocent time of the baby boomers. When asked about these drills, I remember my aunt saying: “We believed what the adults told us.” I wonder if the adults believed that they were telling the truth.

I wonder if children believe the adults of today.

Since Sandy Hook, New York State has mandated four lock-down drills a year. This is where entire schools practice our potential injury or death. We rehearse a possible terrorizing event in the hope that we will “know what to do” in the case of a school shooter.

• 12 years since Sandy Hook.

• 79 years since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

So much has changed in American society since the end of the Second World War. My grandfathers were veterans of that horrible conflict but were able to be proud of their victory to build lives with the GI Bill and employment with companies named GE and Carrier. One income from these jobs allowed for a piece of the American pie. My father, stepfather, and godfather faced a controversial war without a clear victory. Times Square had no welcome home parades or pictures of sailors kissing pretty girls. There was little in the way of therapy or healing. These men came home disillusioned and confused. For many reasons, including the Vietnam War, families dissolved and my generation (Generation X) saw our mothers go to work and learned to heat food after school in our new microwaves.

By the 1980s, threats were less Soviet and more internal. A wave of media attention on missing children flooded our living rooms. Faces of kids were on milk cartons at lunch. White-paneled vans were suddenly suspicious. By the late 1990s to 2000s, children playing outside decreased, and scheduled sports and activities became common. The Soviet Union had returned to being called Russia, and external threats (at least the nuclear ones) seemed like a bad dream.

1999 brought the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. I was teaching eighth-grade social studies then in a school not much different from the scene of the crime. We were on spring break and I watched students leaving that building distraught and dazed.

After Columbine, we began having one point of entry in our schools.

Many of us naively thought Columbine would be an awful, yet unique event. Unfortunately, there have been over 400 school shootings since then.

Today, there was another at a small Christian school in Michigan. Abundant Life Christian School reports that two are dead and six are injured. The shooter was a student. How many times has that been declared: the shooter was a student?

And now, we learn that the assailant was a fifteen-year-old female student.

The threat is from within.

America has no abundance of life.