Last week I completed my final “morning-duty” for the 21-22 school year. My morning duty includes standing at the front door of the school directing traffic and ensuring that all students get across the parking lot without becoming a speed-bump. One of the mothers dropping off her child was weeping. I asked her what was the matter?
She replied that she was afraid. As we all had, she had followed the events unfolding in Uvalde, Texas with great consternation. Now, the next morning, she wondered and fretted. Would she receive her cherished child back at the end of the day? I reassured her, explaining that what had happened there was not at all likely to happen here. That is what I’m supposed to do. She responded well, saying that despite her fears, she knew her son needed an education and that he must go to school. She drove off still fretting. That is our age.
It should not be that way. We have created a society that casually accepts the threat of violence and living in fear. In manifold ways we glorify violence. All types of media fairly drip with violence of some sort or another. Many of my students love wearing t-shirts emblazoned with symbolic violence. Music and movies regularly exalt brutality perpetrated against all types of weak individuals. We see the violence, perhaps even decry it, shrug our mental shoulders, and move along. We exchange pithy memes on the social media platform of our choosing and glare at the “enemy” on the other side of the abyss into which our country and society slides. Everyone agrees that this is a problem, but we do not lift a hand to make things better.
We cherish our “rights” above all. These are my rights, and I will demand them despite the deleterious effect on the greater society. Rarely do we stop and consider what the effect of exercising my rights will have on those around me. Rights are important and we must defend them; however, rights come with responsibility for how we exercise them. As an officer in the Army, I found that increasing rank included increasing rights; but, I also found that those increasing rights entailed an increasing responsibility to exercise them appropriately. In civilian life as a teacher, I enjoy the right to grow a beard, a right denied my students…much to their consternation. What they do not realize and find hard to comprehend even with careful explanation, is that as a professional I am expected to present a high degree of respectability in my dress and appearance. Consequently, I keep my beard well-trimmed and wear sport-coat, tie, and slacks almost every day. I do so without instruction from my principal. I give up my right to wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts, my normal weekend attire, to better serve the community of the school. We need to rethink how we exercise our rights.
We enjoy the many rights enumerated in our founding documents. We must willingly embrace the concept that responsibility accompanies rights. Sometimes when we want to exercise rights that may imperil others, we must accept certain constraints on the exercise of the same. When driving, if I flaunt responsibility long enough, I may very well lose a cherished right. When exercising rights that will ultimately bend society in one direction or another, we must carefully consider how exercising these rights will shape our society. Yes, it is my right to bear arms. But do we really need a society that has 120 weapons for every 100 people (smallarmssurvey.org)? Do we want to build a society in which a mother weeps as she drops her son off for school?
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