published 27 February 2018 in Eugene, Oregon’s newspaper The Register-Guard          

 

“I saw the headline ‘School shooting in Florida.’ It hit me right in the gut. I know that building, I know those people,” said Tom Cantwell, a South Eugene High School English teacher who grew up in south Florida.

Cantwell played Little League with the principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He did his student teaching in the same halls where 17 high school students were killed by a shooter with an AR-15 during fourth period on Valentine’s Day.

Cantwell can’t shake the memory of substitute teaching at a Eugene middle school when a school shooting happened across the river 20 years ago. In those 20 years, American schools have weathered hundreds of shooting incidents, dozens of which have claimed multiple young lives.

“Here’s another one, here’s another one,” Cantwell said, describing the numbness that he, his students, and his coworkers feel after so many years of this ever-present threat.

“I’ve never come to work scared, even the day after these things happen,” he said. “But my wife is scared.”

Being a teacher, he said, should not be dangerous. His wife should not worry that he won’t come home. Parents should not worry that waving at the school bus is their last goodbye.

Cantwell described the surrealism of active shooter response trainings for the South Eugene faculty. He and his fellow teachers have assumed the role of educator, instructor, counselor, guide. “And here we are,” he said, “in a room full of sheriff’s deputies with Nerf guns, teaching us how to barricade.”

Diane Wolk-Rogers, a Stoneman Douglas teacher, reached out to classrooms, including Cantwell’s, “to help my students heal from the horrific event they have experienced.” Mere days after the shooting, Wolk-Rogers reported that her students want to return to the school, and she wants to show them the magnitude of the outpouring national sympathy through letters of support.

“Not the email kind or the texting kind,” she wrote, “I want them to hold the envelopes addressed from around the world and see that they are not alone and there is still kind and caring people in this world.”

South Eugene high schoolers spent a day writing letters to Wolk-Rogers’ classroom. After the students filed out, Cantwell gathered the messages. He placed them one by one into an envelope. “I found myself reading the first lines,” he admitted. “They were honest and sincere, kids expressing their sorrow and frustration.”

Columbine, Umpqua, Thurston, Sandy Hook—the list of tragedies is long and hard to grapple with. But the shooting at Stoneman Douglas has struck a national nerve, mobilizing student walkouts, protests, and an online movement that staunchly rejects the conventional response of “thoughts and prayers.” The loudest and most prominent voices are high schoolers—from Stoneman Douglas to South Eugene.

“The students are fed up,” Cantwell said. The Stoneman Douglas shooting has served as a catalyst for student action. Unified by their shared experiences—active shooter drills, school lockdowns, pervasive fear—and connected more than ever by social media, high schoolers across the country are intent on making Stoneman Douglas the last of these tragedies. Gun legislation affects them, and they want their legislators to protect them.

South Eugene students are organizing a walkout for gun safety in schools, and several are planned to take place nationwide. On April 20, students will walk out on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. On March 14, students will stand silent for 17 minutes—an homage to each of the young victims from Stoneman Douglas.

In the fall term, Cantwell’s English class read Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

“If you disagree with something,” he told his students, “then you act on it. But be willing to pay the consequences.”

It’s morbid to think of national unity that draws its strength from a mass murder on the third floor of a public high school. But the student reactions epitomize good emerging from catastrophe.

The generation of students that this tragedy agitates are tomorrow’s leaders, and they already are leading today. These high schoolers are taking the proverbial torch from the adults whose dogged defense and misguided interpretations of the right to bear arms put student lives at risk every day.

From Stoneman Douglas to South Eugene, students are inextricably connected by their collective fear, and they’ve had enough. After Stoneman Douglas, the victims have finally found a voice—directly from children comes the most salient and outspoken case for gun safety in schools. It’s their right to speak out—to practice this civil disobedience—and it’s our country’s responsibility to listen and enact sensible gun laws that protect our students.