by: Marceline Donaldson
There is no pain like the pain of losing a child – even a temporary loss, let alone a permanent loss by death. The parents and families of the young people killed in Parklands and the families of the teachers, coaches and staff are all constantly in our prayers.
Our children are precious to us no matter how great or handicapped we are at showing it. They are the means by which we achieve eternity and whether we do it consciously or not we give to them all of who we are and what we have.
To know that your child’s last minutes on earth were spent being terrorized, we are never the same. Where does the ‘peace that passes all understanding’ ever come from in our lives after that – even for a few blessed seconds.
To know that it was a child killing children makes the deed no less painful nor does it make it one we will ever forget or ever be able to remember without the pain surrounding the memory also coming back to terrorize us bringing the grief back fresh and new.
To know that the child killing our children was taken up in a time of his greatest need by a group of paramilitary white supremacist bigots and put into training so he could learn to use the guns he used to kill our children and his peers makes our shock and confusion even greater.
Instead of killing those he was being trained to hate and revile and look on as less than and needing such termination, he turned on his own and became a part of the many white on white crime sprees that have been happening around these United States.
Why did he turn to white supremacists in his time of greatest need and why, in the end, did he turn on them and against them by turning their theories – their politics – their religion against them!
We know very little about the details of this young man’s life – this 19 year old, not yet out of his teen years with his mind not quite developed into the adult mind he would have in years to come. We do know he was without a father for many years and his mother died in November of 2017 and we know he was alone. Others may have stepped in to temporarily bridge that gap, but there are few people who know the depths of that kind of aloneness in a society of plenty where being “better than” on so many levels is that to which most of us aspire. One of the greatest in the one upsmanship that we practice is who are or were our parents. We learn to hide our parents if we achieve beyond their class and so they become an embarrassment or their existence amongst our friends and peers “outs” us for being less than we pretend to be. To have no parents and no family puts us on that slippery road to homelessness in the future if we are not really ‘exceptional’ and just ordinary like most of us. When we slip there is no one there to catch us or prevent us from sliding into the muck.
Parklands, Florida is a place – or was a place – that felt “better than” as a community because it was what – all white with very few exceptions? mostly upper economic families? parents raising their own children without many one parent homes, especially the kind with women alone raising children struggling just to keep food on the table let alone keeping a table? without the stigma of having “bad children”; “those ghetto types of thugs roaming the neighborhoods”; – I could go on but you know the stereotype without even having it outlined for you.
In Parklands, as we read in the media, when children questioned their parents and were afraid to go to school – one report tells of a child who wanted to be home schooled because of her fear – the answer was “you don’t have to be afraid, we don’t live in that kind of neighborhood – we live in a good neighborhood.” And the child questioning and everyone reading that account knows what that meant. That is a part of what we have constructed as the reality of our lives. That is what this shooting destroyed for Parklands.
As we go back over these school shootings and the school violence we have been experiencing, we see that it has happened in mostly white, mostly upper-class neighborhoods. We have been experiencing white on white crime with great regularity.
Why!
Is it because when truth and the reality of who they really are hits, young minds can’t contain or deal with that explosion of those truths and their anger leads them to using the weapons of war to let out their anger – against their own who deceived them!
This young man faced a life which looked hopeless! With the death of his mother he was one of those society discards and blames for being in the position he sees himself facing over the years. When the reality – the truth of who he actually was in this society hit and the lies told to keep people like him under control for the rest of society – when that reality hit him, was the only power he had over his life the one he had been taught by his white paramilitary friends? Kill them all before they kill you? Except his explosion was in the truth of who “they” were to him! His peers! The innocents who didn’t create his life as it was rolling out – the innocents who were as trapped in their existence as he was in his – those young innocent children living the same myth which upheaveled his life.
Hardest to hear throughout all of this, for me, has been the teachers, parents, bystanders who described the other children going to school in Parklands who were achieving such great things. Those children who wanted to be doctors, lawyers, who had done projects so outstanding – and on and on many of them went – apparently trying to patch and heal their community by patching and healing the mythology under which they lived their lives and from which they took their identity. Parklands is really a safe community and full of these really great people raising children who would live on to become leaders of society. This is just an aberration caused by someone who didn’t ‘belong’.
Amazingly, that is the pattern of what happened in other communities. Colorado comes to mind with the two young boys who were so outside of what was the norm in their community and so rejected by their peers and others that their explosion when the myth was exploded instead of them and their reality exposed to them – it was more than their young minds could contain and we had yet another school shooting and massacre.
I am sure this is not what those in such extreme pain want to hear. Nor those who are trying to make sense of this want to put in their minds and hearts to help them through a really difficult time. But, sometimes, the best place to start to heal is with truth. Truth replaces grief and moves us to do great things.
For the truth of life in Parklands and the rest of America to take hold and spread is the best thing that could happen to all of us.
When one of our own human community loses father and mother they become our children and our responsibility. The truth is that does not happen. Except for a very few they become weights on the society for whom our Congress people and president forever try to speak in ways to convince the rest of us that those so orphaned are responsible for their own plight and probably the cause of the situation in which they find themselves.
For truth and love to break into a society what an incredible gift.
Would that begin to happen in Parklands, Florida what a gift to their parents the life and death of their children would be. How meaningful would the lives of those young martyrs be if what happens out of their life and death is their opening a door wide to the truth and love that we so sorely need and so strongly fight to keep out and keep away from. Grief can break down barriers because in it we begin to question our lives and how we have made the choices which brought us to this place of grief.
To see the people around us as fully human and truly divine is such a gift. Can’t we accept it – live through it – give it to others.
There are not many times in life when such is possible. This is one and it was given to us by our children. Don’t throw it away. Don’t reason it out of existence. Use it to live less in the mythology that is our life and more into the reality of who we all really are.
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