Karly and I were a paired together for our host community stay in Bangalore, India and we were excellent compliments to each other. Karly had never left North America making India her first country off the continent. I have traveled many places in Europe, Africa, and Asia so I am familiar with some of the intimacies of traveling. Karly also had more teaching experience and is continuing on to get her PhD next year while I am still more or less at the beginning of my career. I live in a big city while she lives in a small town. When one of us answered a question about the American education system often the other could elaborate more regarding the rural/city American setting regarding how they were similar or different. It was a joy to paired with Karly! We even shared the same hotel room in Bangalore. As we got to know each other, our experience of school gun violence we found wassomething we unfortunately had in common.
Karly teaches in rural Ohio in a small town community that is plagued with a generational opioid crisis which is unfortunately becoming more and more common in the USA. She is an amazing educator full of energy, life, and motivation - she is one of the most positive people I have been around. She was selected by the State of Ohio to meet President Obama for a teacher appreciation luncheon, which she originally thought was a joke her faculty was playing on her. Her life as a teacher is full of challenges that come with generational addiction and poverty. She would sometimes talk about how once a student brought a gun to school and it wasn’t confiscated till lunch because the other kids were too afraid to report before then (they all knew he had it because he was showing it off on the bus). She taught that student 2nd period and she had a one on one conversation with him about how he seemed more agitated that day, having no idea he had the gun on him. Could she have lost her life that day? She didn’t - which we are all thankful for, but the memory is forever imprinted on her.
As for myself, I grew up in a small town that also has a drug problem although probably not as extreme as her situation. I also am unfortunately very familiar with gun violence in America as in my same hometown my elementary school bus was the first transportation responder to a school shooting that killed 3 students and a teacher. My elementary school was closest so I suppose that’s why it happened that way. I was in 2nd grade in the first seat of the bus. We were told by our principal that “something horrible happened at Frontier and the buses would be delayed and go a different route.” That route was to the middle school - I didn’t know any other information but what seemed like millions of 12 and 13 year olds boarded the bus all of them sobbing. One Hispanic girl in particular stood out to me as she was sobbing more extreme than the rest. I had never seen a Hispanic girl cry - they in my 2nd grader mind were always the toughest and that’s how I knew things were serious. I don’t remember anything else of that day - I think my aunt from Oregon maybe called and talked to me. The next memory I had was going to church and learning one of the girls who was murdered belonged to our congregation and they had her picture everywhere. I felt incredibly guilty for not knowing her. To this day I am not even sure I remember it all correctly as it was very confusing for me at the time.
Conversations of gun violence in America come up a lot when I have traveled abroad, and India is not excluded from this. It’s a tricky thing to communicate because for both Karly and I it is deeply personal. A large part of America loves their guns over the greater good of the public safety. America is an individualistic society.... it’s more important for some Americans to have rights to own guns than to protect students and teachers or the public in general. I don’t mean to make this political (I can hear the guns rights people countering with all the arguments American people who follow this topic are all too familiar with). But what I am talking about is how in the world does one communicate the uniqueness of American school gun violence to foreigners who do not have this problem.
Imagine you live in a country where most of the people have never been to the USA but the breaking headlines of American news that reaches you are stories of school shootings. You would be curious! And if an American has come all this way to see you, you can ask them all the questions on said topic pretty much as much as you want. Often the solutions they ask about are very reasonable, but I have to give answers like “well it’s not that easy because some people just really really love their guns.” This always floors them... and they ask about x, y, or z and if the American people think about the humanity of others... and I have say things like “well yes we think about humanity up to an extent... but not everyone agrees.” They say “but your children are dying.” I say “I know.” They say, “so why doesn’t society fix it?” And I say “I think American society doesn’t care enough. America does not value community the same way India does.” This answer seems to satisfy their questions, and I am left wondering to myself is that true?
Does American society just not care enough about our communities? I’m afraid I might think the answer is yes.
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