View From the Editor’s Desk: A Somber Week in America
What a somber week in America. It began with a school shooting in Nashville that caused the deaths of three 9-year-old students and three staff members. The week is ending with the historic indictment of a former U.S. president.
Nashville school shooting: Monday’s school shooting took place in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District where my daughter and son-in-law live so we have paid particular attention to it. Their congressman is Andy Ogles who gained notoriety for his family Christmas card depicting he and his wife with their kids holding assault weapons in front of a Christmas tree. An assault weapon was used in Monday’s shooting.
U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black prayed, “Lord, when babies die at a church school, it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers. Remind our lawmakers of the words of the British statesman Edmund Burke: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”
Indeed.
There is much gratefulness for the Nashville police and their lightning-fast response to Covenant School, thus preventing further deaths of America’s children. Many lives were surely saved because of their swift arrival.
As a homeschool mom who educated my kids for 16 years and was in leadership most of that time, the greatest number of phone calls I ever fielded was after the 1999 Columbine school mass shooting in Colorado, the first school shooting I can remember. Distraught parents were calling to see how they could pull their children out of public schools, fearing for their safety – and the shooting had not even happened in Virginia. Sadly, twenty-four years later that angst has not subsided.
A pastor I have respected throughout the years is Dr. Russell Moore, former Ethics President for the Southern Baptist Convention who writes for Christianity Today and lives in Nashville. His thoughts about the still-fresh violence in a quiet corner of Music City:
Whenever a school shooting happens in America, our country is shocked and pays attention for a time. But within a matter of weeks, most people add these events to other names on a list of horrors—Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, and so on. But as others can attest, it’s different when such a tragedy happens in your backyard.
Some of the boys and girls fleeing for their lives are children of dear friends, and almost everyone I know is connected—closely or loosely—with the victims. We all know the church, the school, our neighbors in the Green Hills neighborhood. Things will not be the same here for a very long time.
And yet Americans—especially Christians—should ask just how much we have adjusted ourselves to this kind of horror. How numb to it all have we become?
Noting some think the manifesto written by the school shooting should be public, Dr. Moore continues:
… hate and rage … have become so commonplace in our society that we barely even notice them anymore. How long can we live like this and pretend we are powerless to change it?
…
But can we seriously believe that such derangement is not influenced by a culture that now seems to be in a permanent state of limbic distress—a society in which hatefulness is so “normal” that the only question seems to be which group of people we should hate?
The victims were three students: Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9; William Kinney, 9; and Hallie Scruggs, 9, daughter of the senior pastor at the church connected to the school … and three staff members: Mike Hill, 61, who was custodian; Katherine Koonce, 60, who was head of the school; and Cynthia Peak, 61, a substitute teacher. As Russell Moore said of his neighborhood, “Things will not be the same here for a very long time.”
Former President Donald Trump indicted: As to the other issue of the week, I will leave discussion of that to others because I don’t have all the facts, and neither does anyone else because the indictment for Donald Trump is still sealed.
Be well….
~Lynn
