Dunblane: what do we tell our children?
March
22, 1996
This is what happens. You are sitting in your living-room
and one day a shell comes in through the window and you
have no living-room, no home, no family in the world any
more. It is Beirut. You are working in the garden and one
day your next-door neighbour shoots your husband and tells
you to leave with the children before he shoots you. It is
Sarajevo.
You are planting maize and one day soldiers break through
the bush, rape you, torch the field and move on. When you
go back to the village, there is no one left alive. It is
Mozambique, it is Liberia, it is Rwanda. One day you go to
market but on the way your child moves off the path and her
feet are blown off. It is Cambodia, it is Afghanistan, it
is Bosnia.
You organise an evening class. People are slow to come but
they do, all ages, you are building something good and all
is going well until one evening the soldiers come. No more
evening class, no more community. It is Guatemala, Bolivia,
El Salvador.
One day, just like any other, when you were not expecting
anything else to happen, you send your child off to school
with a clean hanky, their hair not quite brushed because
there wasn't time, their reading book in a folder, a big
hug and a kiss, and "Be good for the teacher" and a man
comes with four guns and you never see the child alive
again. It is Dunblane.
What do we tell our children? That the world is safe,
really, that only the odd "nasty man" is going to come
along and mow some of them - a completely random number -
down now and then?
Or that all the ceremonies of innocence by which we set
such store, the birthday parties, the new shoes, the
haircuts, visits by Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny
are indecent deceptions concealing the grinning mask of
death?
Or do we dust off some old formulae, invoke God's will or
fate, "the wrong place at the wrong time" or perhaps that
ghastly platititude: "There's no such thing as bad luck;
you make your own luck."
As one tough and witty Scots friend of mine said: "Those
who say there's no such thing as luck have always been
lucky."
We live in such a lucky society that we do not even know
it. We can quarrel in the morning over which cereal to eat,
not over who is to eat. We can choose at which school our
children are to learn, not whether they are to go to school
at all. We can choose whether or not to protect our
children against infectious diseases instead of letting
them die. And we can send them off to school in the morning
and expect to see them at the end of the day, safe and
sound.
Except, of course, we can't. Love is no insurance. Health
is no insurance. Money, despite all its current dominion,
is no insurance. Insurance, even, is no insurance.
Closed-circuit television, as the Bulger case poignantly
demonstrated, cannot prevent, even if it can assist
retribution.
Armed guards, for which vengeful public opinion has not
been slow to call, will add to an atmosphere of terror
without necessarily adding to security: what if one of the
guards goes over the top? In one sense, you cannot make
schools, or life, safe.
Yet, as the comparisons with which we began show, there are
ways to make life safer. It shocks to compare Dunblane with
Sarajevo, Liberia, Beirut.
These are places where civil society broke down and where
loosening of external constraints released forces of
destruction within people too. It may not be an accident
that Thomas Hamilton chose a school in which to revenge
himself; schools are a prime site for the reproduction of
social values. The family, that other prime site, is, after
all, the place for the great majority of all murders.
People cannot grow in isolation.
Teachers, as well as rolling back frontiers of ignorance,
hold the line against forces of destruction too - ask
anyone on playground duty.
The better that work is done, the more individuals are
helped to frame their lives within acceptable limits. The
more society values education, peaceful resolution of
conflict, creative co-operation, the less likely it is that
one day someone takes up a gun and takes out his neighbour.
Is that the answer? Pay teachers more, create jobs, ban
guns, lock the doors?
Are there answers?
While society at large ponders policies, individuals can
only suffer. In that suffering, the only sustaining forces
are recognition of loss, and love and its memories. A
little girl smiling at the door, a young boy waving his
hand. Weep, fellow-beings, we owe them our tears. "The
flowers of the forest are a' wede awa'."
Victoria Neumark has three children. She is a parent helper
in an infant class.
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