New Year, New Shakespeare

There’s one sure thing about New Year’s Day:  those of us who are attached to schools know we’re about to go back.  This particular January, I am fortunate to be embarking upon Hamlet with my seniors in a place bearing the motto: “Think, Care, and Act.”

In these times, we could all use a little more of that triumvirate.  The order of the words is no accident, either.  Unless you happen to be suffering from severe melancholy like the Prince of Denmark and charged with doing something – by a ghost no less– that is really pretty awful, chances are your actions will benefit from good doses of both thinking and caring beforehand.

At the dawn of 2013, just in case teachers across the land have not already been asked to spread their job descriptions out enough, we have the whole aftermath of the Newtown tragedy accompanying us back into our classrooms.   Suddenly, the line between armed guards and subject area professionals looks awfully thin.  The very prospect of the same person writing equations or lines of poetry on the board also keeping a handgun in the top desk drawer is more than preposterous – it’s putting the world as we know it completely upside down and backwards.

I agree with what the New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote soon after the NRA came out with its statement:

Well, the Mayans were sort of right.

The world didn’t implode when their calendar stopped on Dec. 21.  But the National Rifle Association did call for putting guns in every American school in a press conference that had a sort of civilization-hits-a-dead-end feel to it.

In that there have also been a few recent news stories about shootings in and around churches, are we to expect calls for clergy to become armed soon too?  I heard recently about some churches that bear signs asking people to please not come in with any concealed weapons.  This would seem to be a given, but perhaps not.  Presuming safety in certain places seems suddenly to be making a huge leap of faith.

It’s safe to say, I think, that we were all kind of staggering around in a kind of numb state after the horrible news from Newtown.  It was, of course, right to go on with Christmas preparations and also right to try not to take anything away from all the wonderful events that still have glowing power every day.  Doing that would be allowing horribly bad things (which come, always uninvited, through the back door) and also spectacularly good things (which we sometimes create and always welcome) to get all mixed up in an unhealthy, unjust and almost even immoral way.

No, to go back to my original metaphor when I started this blog more than a year ago, we need to see those differently colored walls coming together in the corner, recognizing each one of them for what each one is, distinct even if colliding in time and space.

When I worked at a high school in Springfield, there were – and still are – police officers stationed in the hallways everyday. They had guns, of course, but fortunately never had to use them while I was there.  They strolled around, often working cases from the streets that were still brewing in our halls and also breaking up fights on a daily basis.  Everyone came through metal detectors as they entered the building in the morning, but we all knew this measure alone didn’t ensure our safety and that students often let outsiders in through a variety of doors.  Even if we didn’t have shooting within the building, we were often dealing with the effects of violent crime in the neighborhoods close by.

A look at the district’s website today shows a new letter from the superintendent including this statement: “We have invested heavily in our security systems.”  This is, sadly, meant to be reassuring news – even trumping any promise of investing heavily in providing a top tier education so that students living in the inner city might have the same opportunities that students in well-heeled suburban districts do.

Just a couple of days ago, The Times had a front page story about the alarming homicide rate in Chicago — over 500 in 2012.  And would any of us be surprised to know that the murders have been concentrated in certain areas of the city, with most people living on the North Side barely feeling the effects of the gang violence on the South and West Sides?  For some of us, gun violence is still shocking; for others of us, it’s become almost commonplace.

In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet asks whether we can or should “…take arms against a sea of troubles/And, by opposing, end them?”  (III.i. 60-61)  But the metaphor shows its own impossibility:  a good guy with a gun isn’t the answer, especially when firing into a whole other amorphous element.  And there’s even more futility in this image now.  No, we have to think better, not think less, in order to try to defeat what really threatens us.  

Shakespeare’s plays may stay the same on the page, but when we return to them we bring our experiences, like a new set of companions, with us.  As my students begin reading Hamlet for the first time, I get to go along with them.  It’s tragedy all right, but it will also be as if we’re making our way across a field of new-fallen snow.