Another

Another one.

My mother is a high school teacher. One at the rival high school to the one my sister and I attended. These types of shootings freak me out like no other because the school she teaches at is the type of school where they happen. The type of school where there are firm lines between rich and poor, white and black. There is almost no true middle class in that town anymore. It’s non-city status (until about twenty years ago) and close proximity to both Seattle and Tacoma made it a boon for willy nilly construction. On one hand there are incredible multi-million dollar homes on waterfront property and on the other there are a crapload of Section 8 apartments. With the kids attending the exact same school.

It is a liberal community. The kind where the parents teach their kids that we are all the same despite color but than encourage them to stick with their own kind. The kind of schools where the only Blacks and Hispanics you meet are poor. The kind that makes stereotypes about white yuppie brats feel incredibly true.

My mother is fifty-eight years old. She would not like my telling the internet that, as she likes to pass for forty-eight. She has a bad hip, two bad knees and a thumb that screams with pain if you breathe on it. She is always cold. She is a tiny 5’4” (though let us all let her believe she is 5’5 ½”) with a small frame. She does not belong in the middle of the knife fights and other physical confrontations that happen in her school.

But I know my mother, and I know that she would always interfere if a child was going to be hurt.

I am the worst sort of liberal. I think that all kids should be in public schools. That when the rich remove their children than it makes the problem worse. That our best teachers, like my mom, belong in public schools.

But I want it to be some one else’s mother who has to work in war zone.

We are not talking about a bad school or a scary school. We are talking about suburbia. With a lot of tension between white and black and rich and poor. But the kind of school where these things didn’t happen. Until Columbine. And the others that have followed.
Every time I hear of a school shooting my heart stops. Because I know my mother in her heart will always be a teacher and I know that in my heart all I really want is for her to stop being one.