Imaginal Figures In Everyday Life: Stories from the World between Matter and Mind by Harrell Mary

Author:Harrell, Mary [Harrell, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chiron Publications
Published: 2015-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

A NATION DREAMS ITS VIOLENCE

PADLOCKS AND SENTRIES

Between 1996 and 2000, eight major school shootings turned a nation on its head. Nine boy shooters killed two teachers, 30 young people were killed, 72 students were wounded, and three parents were killed, all in schools thought to be safe.

What we know in 2015 is that the escalation of school shootings in American schools since April 20, 1999, the year of the Columbine High School tragedy, has been staggering. For instance, on December 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut 26, 1st graders and educators were killed, shot by 20-year-old Adam Lanza. What many do not know, however, is that between that tragic day in Newtown and 12 months later, there were 14 more school shootings (retrieved from Wikipedia on September 13, 2013). If the current escalation in school shootings continues at its present rate, the United States will see close to a 300% rise in school shootings between 2010 and 2020.

I am compelled to share the following analysis in which I look imaginally at what is occurring. I especially focus on images from Columbine High School, in Colorado, on April 20, 1999 and Pearl High School, in Pearl, Mississippi, on October 1, 1997, not because these events were any more or less troubling than others, but because they may hold answers that will inform all these tragic events.

Before becoming a psychologist, I completed many years as a classroom teacher at the kindergarten to 12th (K-12) level and later, as a college professor. As I go back in time, I remember the following experience, and quickly move to a nontemporal, present moment of soul. Here’s what occurs as I move into this fluid and deep space.

I see, as if simultaneously, hundreds of faces in all the student-filled schoolyards and college campuses I’ve walked through. I know these faces; they belong to my students. The school in which I teach on April 20, 1999 is in California. Yet somehow the bullets fired by young boys on K-12 campuses, even before the April 20th tragedy, (in Springfield, Illinois; West Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; and Jonesboro, Arkansas), have found their way to the soul of my campus.

For many, like me, the knowing is painfully conscious, for others this gnosis lives only in what Robert Sardello (1999) calls a “constriction of soul,” a place without conscious image where fear lives in the body’s altered breathing, forgetfulness, or anxious watchfulness. As a school community, we, like many others, keep the side entrances to our rural school grounds locked throughout the day. Teachers and parents fight unwieldy padlocks as we exit the grounds for lunch or to meet obligations within the school district. I remember that in my early days of teaching, the padlocks that secured the campuses were never used during the school daylight hours, but only at night and on weekends to protect the schools against minor vandalism. As I think of this change, a quiet sadness emerges, like flotsam from a lost ship, its wreckage lazily bumping into itself.

In

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