"Why Do the Police Kill People?"
At some preschools, it's protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?
Somehow, and I can't tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than the truth. At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they evacuate the building and "keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.
In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting events -- San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific. While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such things only in code over granola and yogurt. It's as if we have an unspoken agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings with our kids.
Still, it's strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantà ¡namo and climate change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain. Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).
After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white privilege to a three year old and how the very things that we encouraged in him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority -- were the things black parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting killed by police.
And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one I'm sure we'll hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for such a young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it came to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police officer.
And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldn't think sooner or later that the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, "Because it's nuts! And we're nuts!" I mean, really, where have we ended up when our answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"
And then, of course, there's the anxiety I have about how he'll take in any of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom -- the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.
My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20 little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about what happened. For five and six year olds, they advised not initiating such a conversation, nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didn't get enough information to formulate a why.
Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself. No news, sit tight, and pretend nothing's going on. After all, like so many of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings don't exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here three years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are systematically under attack, yes?
Unlike so many people on this planet, we don't live in a war zone (if you put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car any day of the week, right?
Of course, there's another problem lurking here and it's mine. I'm not there. My three-year-old son is having scary experiences and I'm not there to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what they are preparing him for. They couldn't be creepier. They're a reminder not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
Some Questions Are Easier Than Others
Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live forever, because they get sick and their bodies get old and their organs don't work any more and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well, Google it yourself.
The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that defy Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as best we can in this truly confusing world.
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