In 1961, when I was in the 5th grade, my elementary school would conduct civil defense drills. A piercing bell would ring, and teachers would instruct us to stop what we were doing and shelter ourselves under our desks, covering our eyes and faces as best we could. In that way, we were told, we could withstand the impact of a nuclear blast. Violence wouldn't destroy us. At 10 years old, I chose to believe what I'd been told. What was the alternative?
Over the next few years, my beliefs were profoundly shaken. With other Americans, I saw film footage of the atomic bombing in Japan and its aftermath. Our lives would never be the same. We experienced the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The possibility of imminent destruction became a part of our consciousness. The murders of John and Robert Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X provided painful evidence that even our iconic figures could be obliterated. We witnessed demonstrators being brutalized by authorities we had trusted. We saw our cities on fire. Our lives were being defined by violence.
In recent years and days, that process of definition has escalated. Consider what we see in the daily news. Overseas, terrorists behead human beings or burn them alive, armed barbarians kidnap school girls and sell them into slavery, a publishing house in Paris falls under deadly attack, drone and missile strikes level buildings and neighborhoods. In America, gunmen open fire in suburban malls and movie theaters. Our schools — elementary, middle, high and university — once considered safe havens for our children, are no longer safe. Policemen patrol their campuses. Kindergarteners practice lock-down drills. Our streets have become battlegrounds. Young men gun each other down, execution-style. Children die in hails of bullets. Armed criminals search for prey. People walk looking over their shoulders.
Rather than filling us with horror, violence has become popular entertainment. It's glamorized in music blasting from passing cars. It explodes from our televisions. Crime shows spawn more crime shows as attractive, witty detectives sort through gore with high-tech wizardry. Each day, our children run home from school, grab their game controllers and assassinate each other. YouTube videos of brutal beatings go viral in minutes. Films about snipers and terrorists draw record crowds. Instead of resisting violence, we celebrate it. How can we live in such a world?
All my life, I've believed that problems can be solved. For me, cynicism and despair have never been an option. Neither has apathy. I retired last year after forty years of teaching English and creative writing in the Baltimore County Public school system. From the moment I entered the teaching profession, I was committed to promoting humane values in my students. I encouraged them to think critically and to evaluate characters' behavior thoughtfully. In works as wide-ranging as the novels of Harper Lee and Chinua Achebe and the plays of Euripides and August Wilson, we considered the consequences of moral decisions. Like me, my students were searching for answers.
In creative writing classes, students wrote openly about their lives. Together, we discovered the common ground we shared, and our eyes were opened to the violence many of us had witnessed. A student from Nigeria wrote of hiding in the backseat of a car as her father drove through riots. A student from our neighborhood wrote of lying on the ground face-down as the store where he was working was robbed. A student raised in Baltimore City wrote of losing her brother in a stabbing. We wrote to share the truth. We wrote to make sense of the senseless. We wrote to recover.
Over the last few months, with time to reflect, I've struggled with a growing concern that human beings are hopelessly irrational. How can they only find meaning in life by dominating each other? Dr. King noted that "the ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it."
I too recognize the "descending spiral" that threatens us. I don't want our children and grandchildren to be victims of that spiral.
But I am not ready to give up hope.
Bill Jones is a retired Baltimore County teacher. His email is wjones3@comcast.net.