Column No more Columbines, no more Kosovos
By JOAN CHITTISTER
After a summertime free of the
horror of school violence, the country is now approaching another academic year
with one state after another embroiled in gun control debates and pressured by
lobbying from every side.
Whats to be done about the situation? How do we preserve all
our freedoms and the values that have made America the greatest
democratic experiment of all time and still protect our children, our
society?
Weve all been tsk-tsking a lot about assault in schools
lately. But while we all go on fretting, a small group in Miami goes on trying
to do something about it. All they, and other people like them -- Pax Christi,
the Fellowship of Reconciliation -- need is our attention.
Sandwiched between the massacre at Columbine High School and the
massacres in Kosovo, we have had a White House Summit on teenage violence, a
traditionally defiant National Rifle Association and a jury decision against a
television talk show that ambushes people with emotional secrets and may
trigger the killer instinct in them. We are blaming the media, the gun makers,
Nintendo games, parents, working mothers -- especially working mothers -- and
the Internet for the fact that the streets of our country run red with the
blood of our own children. We are blaming everyone and everything in sight.
At the same time, we seem to be missing the fact that, as a
culture, we ourselves, the good guys, bomb into submission what we cannot
otherwise control, are suffering case after case of police brutality and rank
with the most socially backward countries in the world in our practice of
capital punishment. And, apparently, our practice of capital punishment is
haphazard. Consider, for example, the 12 men recently released from prisons in
Illinois after years on death row who, DNA has shown, could not possibly have
committed the crimes for which we were about to put them to death.
We fail to see that we have built violence into the culture; we
support it, subsidize it, applaud it. And we wonder how it is that our children
have learned it so well. We call it good when we do it and bad when they do
it.
And so we are changing little. We still have the guns, we still
have the television shows and we still have the killings. Tsk, tsk.
While I was tsk-tsking I found a place in Miami that has been
working on the problem for years. Its called The Peace Education
Foundation: A Research-based Violence Prevention Curricula and Training
Program. The foundation isnt nearly as well-known as the NRA but it
should be.
And its staff would like it to be. For all our sakes. They, and
other groups like them, are standing there in place, prepared to do more than
fret and patiently waiting for families, parishes and the American school
system to find them.
They have something to offer that the conferences, the social
outcries and the national blaming do not. Theyre doing something and
making it possible for us to do something. They arent criticizing;
theyre changing things.
Theyve designed materials for kindergarten to grade 12 to
teach a child how to fight fair, how to avoid violence, how to use I care
... language. The materials include workbooks, communication rules,
posters and activity guides. The foundation produces well-written, interesting
materials on nonviolent conflict-resolution skills from kindergarten through
high school, including a volume on Fighting Fair in Families. They
train teachers how to use the materials. And they hold recognition dinners for
children who embody the principles in outstanding ways, the way we used to have
I speak for democracy contests and Altar Boy Essay Awards in a
different day with different needs -- the kind of good programs we say we wish
we had now.
The truth is that I didnt know about this particular group
either. (Good things are not considered newsworthy these days, you know.) I
wonder if I would ever have discovered the group, in fact, if I hadnt
been picked up at the Miami airport by the 80-year-old nun who started this
peace foundation. She now shares its administration with a young graduate of
Georgetown University who studied international politics.
Together they make an odd but beautiful pair: She is
great-grandmotherly, bustling, clear-eyed, competent and experienced in the
ways nuns who have spent their entire lives in schoolrooms so commonly are. She
looks 60, sounds 50 and moves like a 40-year-old. He is young, committed, full
of energy, knowledgeable and well trained. They link one generation, one social
vision, one world to another. They and the large staff of professionals
theyve gathered around them are spending their lives trying to give us
another chance.
Lets put it this way: What weve done as a people so
far clearly hasnt worked. Isnt it time we try something else? If we
want to change a situation bred by power, by competition, by social wrath, we
need first to change our own attitudes toward it and the ways we go about
dealing with all of it, both the good guys and the bad guys.
But dont believe me: Send for their catalog yourself. The
address is Peace Education Foundation, 1900 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL
33132-1025 or phone: 1-800-749-8838.
This column is not a paid advertisement. Its a plea. No more
Columbines. No more Kosovos.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister writes from Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, September 10,
1999
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