"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men
say. I just watch what they do.” --
Andrew Carnegie
The first news bulletins from
Littleton, Colorado on the car radio were sketchy at best on April 20, 1999. My
husband and I were driving toward the Twin Cities to visit the historic Titanic
Exhibition. In a bizarre twist the two events, 87 years and six days apart, were
to become indelibly connected in my mind.
It was after 9 p.m. that
evening before we finally tuned into CNN from our hotel room. Commentators attempting
to make some sense out of the shooting and bombing at Columbine High School
switched back and forth between Colorado and the refugee crisis in war torn Kosovo,
another tragedy suddenly relegated to second place in the infotainment food
chain. The images of stunned people living half a world apart in places numb from
unimaginable calamity wrought by modern weaponry were almost
interchangeable.
Among those interviewed was Marion
Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund. She stated that in most
communities it was easier for a teenager to get a hold of a gun than a library
book. I thought about the parental permission forms required to obtain a
library card under the age of 18 and supposed she could be right.
Twelve hours later saw us
stepping back in time to the last hours of the doomed Titanic. We managed to
cover about half the exhibit before several classes of fourth graders
poured in. Carrying some sort of worksheet, the girls and boys darted in
between display cases and the few adults in the gallery like minnows schooling
around pier pilings.
Remembering the Rhinelander
District Library’s chapter of Junior Historians, I was initially excited at the
prospect of observing these youngsters reacting to their surroundings. Sadly,
the majority of them didn't seem to be connecting at all. The paper they
clutched was a checklist designed to make sure they "saw" everything,
but their visit quickly become a frenzied scavenger hunt focused on filling in
the blanks to earn access to the gift shop.
After the wall of 2,226 passenger
names, the last thing the kids passed before entering souvenir land was the visitors
comment book. Many of their reactions were surprisingly thoughtful considering
the frantic atmosphere. However, the first page I flipped to contained these
words in childish scrawl:
"It was pure crap. No
guns."
I wondered then, as now, how
the personal reality of the child writing those six words in the Titanic
Exhibition guest book would someday be translated into the pages of time. By my
reckoning that 1999 grade-schooler was only a couple years older than Adam
Lanza of Newtown, Connecticut.
Flash forward twelve and a
half years to another story unfolding on the car radio as I drove home to
Rhinelander from the WVLS office on a December evening. Another massacre in
another school in another quiet, above average income community. Only this time
it was elementary school children and teachers. I gripped the steering wheel, remembering
all the bright, eager gap-toothed smiles I’d seen during twenty-seven years as
a children’s librarian, and felt physically ill.
Over the weekend that
followed, we learned their names and faces.
Charlotte. Daniel. Olivia. Josephine. Ana. Dylan. Madeleine. Catherine.
Chase. Jesse. James. Grace. Emilie. Jack. Noah. Caroline. Jessica. Benjamin.
Avielle. Allison.
Rachel. Dawn. Ann Marie. Lauren. Mary. Victoria.
Nancy. Adam.
As an anxious public reaches
for answers that may never be known, Adam Lanza has been described as autistic,
possibly challenged by Asperger’s syndrome, and home schooled. ABC News even reported
that geneticists have been asked to study his DNA for “abnormalities and mutations.”
Caught up in the furious
media driven stew that has mixed the voracious debate over guns, massacres and
mental illness, it’s vital that we don’t create additional stereotypes for
struggling children who are every bit as bright and loving and deserving of our
nurture as those who died in the first grade classrooms of Sandy Hook
Elementary.
Isolation and
misunderstanding, hubris and blame create invisible wounds. We are passengers
all together on this journey.
There are striking similarities
between our world of 2012 and the gilded age of a century ago that launched the
Titanic, a veritable calamity of human failing. Captains of industry still plot
a full throttle course under cover of darkness without binoculars in the crow’s
nest, paying more attention to the dictates of marketing than to warnings of potential submerged danger. Life
boats for all simply aren’t a priority. Those not berthed in first class are expendable.
Icy water and bullets are
equally unimpressed by social strata. Terror cuts across all boundaries of race
and place. Thousands of Americans are slaughtered annually in less picturesque
communities than Newtown but their loss doesn’t capture public notice.
Enough!
May our lifeboat libraries
welcome all children, making it easier to obtain a library card than a gun. May
librarians overcome fear with knowledge, providing answers to tough questions while
recognizing all points of view. May we continue to address poverty of the mind,
enfold lonely spirits and give support to those who grieve.
