following yonder star

since the beginning, i had been warned that this would happen. just because of the nature of the school i'm teaching at, family members of students will die by violence. friends of students will die by violence.

students. students will die by violence.

yesterday at 10:00 a.m., a student who attended my high school was shot in a drive-by shooting.

at 10:30 a.m., he was pronounced dead.

during that half-hour interval, when this young man should've been in school, we were having an all-school assembly about gang violence, about the importance of putting street things aside in order to get educated.

the student who was killed had only been enrolled for 3 weeks. my understanding is that he enrolled, and then only attended classes once after getting his schedule.

i did not know this student. he was not enrolled in any of my classes. i had not encountered him in the halls. if you showed me his picture, i probably couldn't pick him out of a lineup.

but my students did know him. they were friends with him. in the face of their grief, stunned or otherwise, i don't know what to say.
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at my high school, the topic of gang violence is a frequent dialogue. we talk a lot about the world of the streets vs. the community within the school, and how the two cannot intermingle. i know for a fact that my principal has, in the past, called the leaders of the latin kings into his office in order to intercede with them about letting our kids leave school, no matter their affiliation. but the influence of the school does not extend as far as we might hope; just a block away, the world of the streets reigns supreme.

and i, i, with my basic suburban white-person midwestern-that-isn't-chicago notion of what gangs are--we were flooded with information about them in the fifth grade; i vaguely remember that the crips and bloods would battle on the football field one thursday afternoon but didn't know who belonged to either--i cannot grasp this. i don't know what it means, if it was expected or unexpected. i don't know if i should be sad, or sorry, or angry, or depressed.

i really thought that going to school to become a teacher would include information about this. but this is what nobody talks about, what nobody wants to bring up--your students, they will die. your students, they will get cancer, or they will get shot, or they will get in car wrecks--and nobody tells you how to deal with that. not as a person, and not as a teacher.

i did not know this boy, and still i am torn up inside.
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today, when the assembly was called after lunch to talk about the boy that died, i listened. i heard the circumstance. i heard how his dad reacted. and the only thing that came to mind was

my friend, you would not tell with such high zest
to children ardent for some desperate glory
the old Lie: dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori.

because the similarities are very close. we, as a culture, have largely rejected the notion of war. we believe in pacifism, in working things out, in peace treaties, in arguments, in military accords. but we do not believe in people--children--dying for a cause that is not unequivocally just.

and yet--within our cities, on our streets, warfare rages. the battles might take place too late at night, or too early in the morning for anyone to notice--but they happen. the battles might be too subtle--a single shot, a savage yet near-silent beating--but they happen. and for what? for territory, for the right to sell drugs, for the right to stand on a certain corner anywhere in chicago and get recognized?

at this point, my students would inevitably say, miss kate, you're tweakin'.

and yet, dears, i assure you i am not. because i know that many of my kids are the second-generation descendants of gang members, and what were they told? die for your brothers, fight your enemies. and what are they, in turn, telling their children? sure, they're tiny-toddling now, but what about a decade from today? will you want them, guns in hand, fighting for the brothers you keep so close?

and for what? for what?
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a boy, gunshot to the chest, leaves the place of his assault on foot. he tears down four blocks or so, before falling down. pitching forward, loss of blood, torn of organs, dead.

if a gangbanger falls in the forest, does anyone hear it?