May 16, 2022
Dear LREI Families,
I thought for a bit about whether or not to write to you regarding the murders in Buffalo on Saturday. I think that I knew that I would but what was getting in my way was/is a sense of futility. Not that I think that my letters will have some great national impact but that maybe the need would lessen. Ultimately, of course, I started to write as that is what we have come to do to remind ourselves that these situations, the murderous, hate-filled, racist, anti-Semitic events are not the norm, cannot become the norm, that they must always be seen as abhorrent and extraordinary.
Even though I have written this letter before, and while I acknowledge that each one is slightly different, I had difficulty putting my many thoughts into a coherent whole. Below I share some of these thoughts with you as they came to me and not in some order of importance.
First, I am just so sad about the loss of these 10 lives and the impact that these deaths have on their families and friends. Just awful. A real tragedy.
I am so angry at and saddened by the hatred and racism of this action. I am aghast at the naked bigotry. I wish I could say that I am surprised. How does one learn to hate this way? How could no one have seen this coming or responded when they did?
While this one person is responsible for this one act, he is not alone in his actions and thoughts, and hatred. Somehow the speakers of truth, peace, and love must be louder than the spewers of hatred, those who stake their political and financial fortunes on the division between neighbors, on the spreading of false narratives, and on the heat and fire of racism and bigotry.
Why was this gun, any gun, available to this person, and really to any person. I hear the second amendment and hunting arguments coming my way. These arguments cannot stand in the way of making this type of massacre impossible to carry out. If we feel we cannot stop hatred, maybe we can stop the terror that guns bring when combined with bigotry. See this list of incidents of gun violence. It is appalling. The shooting in Buffalo was not the only mass shooting this weekend. In some ways the way forward is quite simple, we must equally value all lives more highly than an attachment to and a reliance on an antiquated sense of historical norms and definitions of freedom. We have to call out the nation’s adherence to laws and behaviors that diminish the lives of some of our neighbors for what they are – racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, and so on.
Closer to home, we will continue our work. We will be there for our students, for our colleagues, and for families in the wake of this violent moment, talking with kids and listening, always listening, and will reflect on our responses and get better at this than we are today. We will continue to grow and learn and to become a more just community ourselves, as individuals and as a whole. Just in the ways we treat each other and the ways we come together as a community and just in how we respond in the aftermath of racist, violent, hate-filled events.
I am sure I will write a letter like this again, I am very sorry to say. I just wish that I was doing so at the same time as those whose words and actions could have a real impact would say something that is not quite as impotent as what we have heard in the past 36 hours.
I am just so sad, so sorry.
Peace and fellowship,