The panel did have something of a road map. Columbine High School in Colorado, where 12 students and one teacher were killed by gunmen 1999, removed the library where most of the victims died and replaced it with an atrium. Virginia Tech "converted a classroom building where a student gunman killed 32 people in 2007 into a peace studies and violence prevention center," the AP said. At West Nickel Mines Amish School in Pennsylvania, officials built a new school several hundred yards away after a gunman killed five girls there in 2006.
And at California's Oikos University, where seven people were killed in 2012, the classroom where they were slain is now "used only for theology classes," NBC News noted.
The reason why is obvious:
Brian Engel, whose 6-year-old daughter, Olivia, died in the shootings, told the task force he didn't want Olivia's younger brother to have to walk into the building where the massacre took place: "We do want him to go to Sandy Hook School, but at an alternate location—not where his sister died."
The building has been contaminated, and they know of no way to purify it, no rite to exorcise it.
But this is a rich man's solution to the problem of "psychic pollution." And we aren't very consistent about it. If a child is stabbed to death waiting for the subway, we don't pour concrete in the station and call it a monument.
I don't recall many of these sorts of solutions in the histories of eras when death wasn't so isolated from normal life. I have no desire to go back to those days of deadly medicine and high infant mortality. (I suspect we will, but that's another issue.) But the effort we spent on hiding death seems disproportionate. We are all going to die, and what place can you go that has not seen death, even early and tragic death?
It seems cruel to bring a 6-year old boy into the class where his sister was murdered. But you can't hide the murder from him, and to put the facade of a new building over it won't conceal the crime. Maybe it is kinder to have him face the place, and let him promise that he is going to live.
Is there any sort of purification people can recognize outside of razing and starting over?
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube and you have already said "this locztion will always be traumatic for you" it's hard to go back.
ReplyDeleteI'd bet if they hired an Chippewa medicine man to wave eagle feathers and puff smoke around the rooms people would be willing to use the school again. Some neighborhoods might ask a priest to sprinkle holy water, but if Newtown is anything like Madison they'd prefer the non-Western.
ReplyDeleteSince everyone dies, it would be kind of nuts to try to make a fetish of anywhere a death has happened. Some deaths are so traumatic and harrowing, though, that I can see why there's an impulse to set aside their location as something special. It's like rituals: meaningless in themselves, but a useful way to focus human attention and reverence. There's a good reason places like Auschwitz ended up as museums instead of shopping malls.
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