Bird Droppings April 17, 2012

So many things today

 

Five years ago today the headline of the Atlanta Journal Constitution drew everyone’s attention with four inch letters “Bloodbath” and the article went on to address the response of the nation to shootings at Virginia Tech the previous day. At that time my middle son called that afternoon reassuring his mother and I that he was fine but so many of his friends at VT were very taken back. Georgia Tech and VT are both ACC schools and very competitive and many friendships had been made over the years.

As I think back to other school shootings and similar events it seems we always search for why and how and then try and place blame. I recall reading a blog back when the Red Lake Reservation shootings occurred. Many people within a day or two had already forgotten what happened on a poor Reservation inMinnesota. The shooter was a Native American high school student who had serious mental issues and a troubled past. Kent Nerburn who I quote many times and read constantly had at one time taught at that high school. Kent Nerburn was the founder and past director of Project Preserve at Red Lake High School on the Red Lake Reservation and knew many of the people directly and indirectly in this event. On that day in March 2005 he wrote an essay for release in the New York Times and asked that it be shared on the internet and with newspapers where ever. I am sharing again today because as we sit wondering those children at Red Lake and at Virginia Tech and several more schools since could have been and are our children.

 

“It is a sad and tragic and story, made all the more poignant by my knowledge of the people, the reservation, and the land on which this all took place. I wish there was something I could do. But I cannot reach across to my friends; I cannot share the grief of the Red Lake community that I have grown to know and love. What I can do is reach out to those of you in your cities and homes and commuter trains and ask you to watch.

Watch as the journalists and TV. reporters fly out from their home cities, land in Minneapolis, catch a commuter flight to the small airport in the forests of Bemidji, and drive their rental cars thirty miles north through the pine and poplar to the Red Lake Reservation. Watch them as they go to the small convenience store, interview a few folks, and push their way as near as possible to the school building that sits on the gravel parking area near the edge of the great northern lake that gives the reservation its name.

Watch them go into the tribal offices, try to interview the tribal chairman, a young man with a dream of making his reservation a better place, and then scurry back on the dark country roads to their hotels in Bemidji and where they can issue dispatches about a student caught in a culture of poverty and hopelessness on a rural reservation.

It will all be quite earnest and at least partially true. But it will not get to the heart of the matter. It will not show the love and sense of family that is at the core of the reservation. Nor will it will reveal the unique sense of grief that fills a culture where the drum is the metaphor for community — when the drumhead is struck in one place, the whole membrane shudders and the sound reverberates everywhere.

What it will do, I’m afraid, is reduce this tragedy to a sociological event. “Rural reservation” is carte blanche for journalistic speculation about social problems and cultural hopelessness.

So watch to see if that is what this story becomes. And wonder why the same story in the wealthy suburbs of Denver did not immediately become fallow ground for sociological speculation about wealth, anomie, and fundamentalist Christianity gone awry.

This Red Lake story is hidden beneath two layers of mythology and misunderstanding that pervade contemporary American culture: “rural” and “Indian reservation.” In each lies a series of expectations and misconceptions that obscures the truth of events and makes what takes place there something “other” than the workaday affairs of our urban and suburban lives.

Watch, now, and see if that mythology and misunderstanding obscures the truth. I know Red Lake. I know those kids. They are just like my students asleep in their beds here in Oxford, just like your children brushing their teeth and packing up their books down the hall from where you are sitting reading this paper.

It was Sitting Bull, the great Lakota chief, who said it best: “Come, let us put our minds together to see what kind of life we can create for our children.”

Those children in Red Lake are your children. Hear their cries and the cries of their parents as if they were your own.” Kent Nerburn March 21, 2005

 

“It is easier to become a father than to be one” KenNerburn

 

This eloquent simple quote has been hanging on my wall now for several years. This quote can be taken in so many different ways. When he wrote the quote in his book to his son I am sure his meaning was sincere and not joking around or locker room talk and as you read his thoughts that he is trying to convey to his son, a tear will form.

Many years ago I was blessed to be able to be by my wife’s side as she gave birth to our first son. Today is his birthday as she reminded me this morning nearly thirty one years ago around 5:00 AM we were heading to the hospital. We were one step from a C section as he was in no hurry to be born. I think he may have been holding on, actually as he was born and Dr. Fried handed me our baby he relieved himself all over me and the two nurses. I think the good doctor knew something and moved leaving me to get soaked; my first father’s day experience.

Since then with three boys it has been a never ending experience and re-experience of events that will carry with me forever. As I think back to that first day of day care, kindergarten, first grade and every grade for that matter times three. Then later in their lives learning to drive , 4H, church, reunions, going shopping, vacations, weddings and now grandbabies. I could say a veritable life time of experiences and moments that will be with me forever. Each a father’s day has become a gift unto its own.

Recently a staff member at LHS made a comment about his father’s day gift new tires on his wives car. Being a father is not easy. I recall holding a tiny child as they put an IV in for surgery or holding a screaming child while they try to put in stitches from a fall at Lanier Islands on the way up the stairs going home of all things. It could be laughing when an overhead scarlet ibis drops a present on an unsuspecting tourist. (Ibis’s are big, very big birds and they roosted in the trees on former Discovery Island at Disney World.) If you need a laugh someday ask my oldest son why it is good to wear a hat onDiscoveryIsland. It is easy and hard, all part of life and yes I would do every minute over again. So today as a parent I think back on my own kid’s lives and then ponder about the parents of those students at Virginia Tech and the emotions and thoughts that went through their minds. I do believe we each have purpose in life and I so often mention my concept of a puzzle falling in place. I look back at Kent Nerburn’s words he had worked and lives nearby the Red Lake Reservation and directly and  indirectly was impacted, I think back to my son calling saying how his friends are so very shaken up at VT.

I read that headline and wonder as we send more children off to fight in ever seemingly senseless wars.  We end one and begin another and where daily news is worsening be it about scandals here in our government or in the “democratic” government we force on other countries. So hard to respect when audits of funding reveal so much corruption in that government inIraqeven now. But I know as cynical as I can be at times what it is to be a parent and that around the world today be it on the campus at Virginia Tech or in a small village in Iraq anywhere where children are dying because someone else deemed them a target we need to keep all in harm’s way in our thoughts and in our hearts and as hard as it is to always give thanks.

namaste

bird