As I watch the seemingly endless cable news video recap of the Parkland Florida high school shooting, I watched the fully swat-outfitted police move toward the danger of an “active shooter” who had set off the fire alarm to bring out his victims for execution—17 dead, 14 wounded at last count. These officers were willing and trained to risk their lives to save the children.
Brave teacher Melissa Falkowski herded her students into a closet, hiding them for half an hour, painfully hanging up on a call to her mother so she could hold it together for her kids. A hero of protection was Mellissa, rising to the very highest level of her duty.
School officials had implemented safety protocols and had trained teachers in emergency procedures. In any case, Melissa became a hero of circumstance who had sufficient resources, presence of mind and spirit to save her students from this moment of modern depravity. Her heroism was the kind that saves others from danger and death.
A father came on scene to see the force of terror on the faces of others as he looked for his daughter’s face among those fleeing death. He immediately knew that image would be with him forever.
The police who rushed toward the shooter were heroes of a different sort, exercising the heroism of confronting killers. They ran toward danger to shut it down so fewer would die. They risked their lives directly by seeking to confront the killer with their own deadly force.
As I watched this deadly drama unfold, in its cable-news configuration, it occurred to me that an entirely different, but maybe related, form of running toward danger is happening in this entire nation of violence.
We as a nation seem unable to stop running toward the greatest danger of all — another form of violence we have created ourselves. It is the self-destruction of denying that we are killing each other and ourselves by destroying the very basis of our own existence—the living Earth systems upon which we depend for our sustenance and survival.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 