It’s time to act: teaching conflict resolution needs to happen now
Earlier this week, another political figure was shot and killed. Earlier this week, another school shooting happened, this time leaving some in critical condition. Just two weeks ago, kids were killed in Mass on the first days of school. Violence is everywhere, and it’s becoming too commonplace.
In my mid-twenties, I lived in an intentional faith community in North St. Louis called Claver House (named for the Jesuit St. Peter Claver). My bedroom was on the back of the house, and an alley was behind our house. One evening, I was laying in my bed, talking to my mom on the phone, and I heard gun shots close. I rolled off my bed onto the floor, told my mom it was thunder and I needed to go, and crawled into the hallway to get away from the window in my room.
Two men in the neighborhood were in a disagreement, and they turned to guns. Our house was hit in the crossfire, and we had a few windows that were broken when bullets entered. We were so lucky but shaken up. A Jesuit priest, Fr. Jeff Harrison came over to help us process the violence. He shared the importance of conflict resolution and how leaders in the Ville community were going to start offering classes on this, reaching out to people and working on this. It was needed. When I taught at the local Christian Brothers middle school, I remember seeing students who had gun violence impact their lives; one girl even came to school after a relative was shot and killed – we were her safe place and the place where she felt normalcy. This event was over 20 years ago.
As a country and a world, we struggle with conflict resolution and have forgotten the sacred life in each human. I see it in every photo or clip of a shooting and in all of the images of aftermath in the war. We are desensitized to the violence because it happens so often. I see people on both sides of the political spectrum who only care when someone on their side is impacted. (Side note: my students were reading “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson today, and one student even picked up on this with the character of Tessie. Tessie thought it was acceptable to stone someone until she became the victim.) We forget that with every death, a family mourns a life, that people’s lives are changed permanently forever.
I think we’re at a point in gun violence where we need drastic measures. As a parent and teacher, my children and students have to earn privileges. Having a gun is a privilege. Does that mean hunting and gun sports will stop? Not necessarily, but we have to rethink things; maybe you have to check one out and use it for that time at that location and check it back in. We have proven as a society that we cannot use them properly or safely so we should lose the privilege of having it until we can fix ourselves.
What needs to be fixed for us to earn back gun privileges? I think it’s the same thing that Fr. Harrison talked about twenty years ago; we need desperately to work on conflict resolution and having civil discussions. We have done a terrible job teaching this facet of character education to our kids and are terrible at modeling it as adults. We live in a “cancel” culture and hide behind social media. People choose live in an echo chamber or avoid those who differ from them rather than engaging in dialogue. People say things online that they would never have the courage to say to someone in person, and now that they can post “anonymously” in certain forums, it’s even easier to be mean and target others.
We have forgotten what makes a person human and how we have more in common than what we have different. My seniors study a lot of world literature in the first semester of their final year with us, and that’s the message I want them to take away. There are things that make people HUMAN no matter what race, where they live, what religion, what political ideology.
Jesus is our example of how to treat people in the Bible. I’ve had many Ignatian retreats I’ve gone on that have challenged me to really imagine myself in those scenes with him. It opened my eyes to really pay attention to who he befriends, what he believed, to think about how I would have acted if I had the chance to be in the scene with him. If you are Catholic or Christian, I really challenge you to think about what is happening in our world. We have entered a time where it seems like we have forgotten the value of each individual; Jesus saw that, befriending so many outcasts and people who were not like him.
I enter this weekend pondering: how do we teach better conflict resolution? How do we show that all people matter – no matter what their skin color, religion, gender, nationality is? How do we get to a place where we remember that human beings truly do have more in common than they do different? How do we establish gun control so that guns are not a solution? How do we accept those we don’t like? Our world is broken. We need to come together to answer these questions. They should be part of our prayer. They should be serious questions our government leaders genuinely want to answer if they really care about each individual in this country (and this world).
Every day, people are grieving. We are in dark days. I hope we can ponder these questions and start to be the light. Let’s work for peace.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
– Gandhi
