|
|
|
March 16, 2001/Adar 21, 5761, Vol. 53, No.24
Best shotEditorialAnother troubled teen. Another gun.The chilling formula for schoolyard violence played out yet again in Santee, Calif., last week. Fourteen-year-old Andy Williams opened fire from a high school restroom, cutting down two students and injuring 13 others. A skinny outsider struggling to fit in, a new kid who became an easy target, he morphed into an angry teenager who took his unhappiness into his own hands and pulled the trigger. Santee responded quickly. Grief counselors met with students to assuage fears; clean-up crews washed away the blood and patched the bullet-pocked walls. But even as the students returned to school, the horror remained and the unanswered questions reverberated: Why does it happen? And how can we make it stop? More stringent gun control would decrease the easy availability of weapons and the likelihood of yet another barrage. More school counselors could pick up on worrisome social undercurrents and intercede with help and support. Stronger families would provide our children a necessary refuge in an increasingly complex and scary world. And deeper knowledge of our religious traditions would give them guidelines to help them find their way while shoring up parental legitimacy as providers of both unqualified love and well-defined limits. Healthy dialogue on these pages in the past few weeks has focused on the benefit of education steeped in Jewish values. Readers have discussed the merits of going back to our textual sources, Torah, Gemarrah, Mishnah, and teaching our children the ethics of their fathers (and mothers) in an atmosphere suffused with yiddishkeit. Day schools and after-school religious school programs can also help to transmit essential ways of acting and being to our children. Alienation which plays out in schoolyard shootings will only be stemmed by inculcating our children with an understanding of what our tradition teaches: the difference between right and wrong, an inherent respect for life and an inbred sense of responsibility for each other. In this troubled world, that is still our best shot. |
