Sadness in Spring
March 25th, 2005,Spring is singing in the air and in the streets. A cardinal perches in the trees near our house and sings loudly and beautifully every morning. The gutters in our street are gurgling with water from melting snow. The sun is higher in the sky now and its rays are warmer. It’s the Christian Holy Week, and Easter is this Sunday. All signs point to the arrival of spring and the joy that comes with the new season.
I would be content to write about the approach of winter’s end this week, but the region is in the world news now for an unfortunate reason. On Monday, March 21, a teenager shot and killed ten people (including himself) at the high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, home to the Red Lake band of Ojibwe, also called the Chippewa or Anishinabe.
We see the faces of shocked Ojibwe on our television screens. There, also on the screen, is an aerial shot of the school, which, apart from the snow on the ground, looks as though it could be almost any other school in the country.
We read and hear about so much suffering and death in our world that we tend to become emotionally distant from all of it, and in many ways I have the same reaction to this sad event. It was not that long ago–November of last year–that we heard about the shooting of six hunters in northwestern Wisconsin. However, I have thought about the horror that must have been felt by the Red Lake victims and those threatened by the gunman. As I picture in my mind what might have happened, I see the events happening in my old high school. I suppose this is my way of imagining the enormity of what happened for the people who experienced it.
Shortly after the shootings, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty spoke to the public with heartfelt sadness and compassion for the victims. The school seemed to have what was necessary to protect students, he said. It had security guards and a metal detector. In the end, he said, no precautions can provide absolute protection from someone bent on doing harm.
I must agree with the governor, though in a limited way. The killer talked about guns and shooting people at school. He left messages and images on the Internet that signaled his troubles. It’s surely possible that someone could have seen the signs, and this young man might have been steered back to sanity. But at the same time, not all violence and madness can be prevented. We live in an imperfect, fallen world, and we experience grief and sadness at its sometimes mad ways, even as spring happens around us and we sing songs of praise and resurrection.