Is this how we will live? | Opinion
Just a few hours before the Allen shooting, I was 720 miles east of Collin County, sitting in a packed arena and cheering loudly for my older child as he received his diploma. Cooper graduated from Auburn University with a finance degree, one of 4,866 students earning an Auburn degree that weekend.
Then I read online the news from home, and I was reminded that joy and despair can co-exist.I am proud of Cooper for graduating in four years, for adjusting to the COVID-19 challenges that every college student faced in 2020 and 2021, for making tough decisions, for working while taking up to 18 credit hours at a time. I can’t wait to see where his career takes him and how he chooses to spend his free time to build a life of contentment and purpose. I am fortunate to have that privilege. As I was celebrating his past and anticipating his future, families connected to the Allen shooting were robbed of the same privilege. I’ve felt the need since May 6 to temper my own joy in recognition of what our community has lost. We humans are resilient. Most of the young adults who are graduating from colleges across the country this month were born in the months before Sept. 11, 2001. They were raised by parents shocked by unspeakable terror, parents who still reconcile life before 9/11 with life after — the only way of life that their children have ever known. These are the same young people who grew up with lockdown drills in school. Their younger siblings learned how to barricade classroom doors in case of an armed intruder. Is this how we want to continue to live? Can we find our way to civil conversations and compromise so that we might slow down — or even stop — adding to the list of massacres? What role can regular people have in making a difference? I admit to feeling defeated when I consider ways that I can make a change. And I dread knowing that folks will scold me for suggesting a discussion that might lead to an action that they believe will infringe on their interpretation of the Second Amendment. In the middle of that defeat, though, I’ve been inspired by a 10-year-old and a human rights champion. A fifth grader who I tutor on Saturday afternoons was practicing her speech this week for the living museum at her elementary school. She had studied Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a 19th-century leader in the women’s rights movement, and was preparing to speak on Stanton’s behalf. She spoke of Stanton’s childhood, marriage to an abolitionist lawyer, role in the Seneca Falls Convention and legacy beyond death: “I died on October 26, 1902, in New York City. In 1920, 18 years later, women in the United States finally received the right to vote.” My young friend can’t believe that there was a time when women had so few rights, and she is in awe of Stanton and her friends who stood up for women even though they weren’t alive to witness the results of their work. Stanton lived with purpose, and though she never cast a ballot in an election, her legacy endures a century later. What is our purpose in these weeks after Allen? What work can we continue or begin that might come to fruition years from now? I don’t yet know the answer, but I do know that we owe it to our children to help lighten the load.
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