When I was 17 and left home to live with a host family in a country that was about as foreign to us at the time as it was possible to be, my parents had to trust – in me, in the host family, in the school I was attending, and the AFS exchange programme that had arranged it all.
In 1980, Vietnam had invaded Cambodia a year or two earlier, had ousted the Khmer Rouge from power in Phnom Penh, but there were still regular battles as the Khmer Rouge fiercely fought for their territory along the Thai-Cambodian border. Removed from English-language media, I knew there was fighting, but felt safe in Thailand – even when I visited villages close to the border – which just proves ignorance truly is bliss! It turned out that several times during my year away, my parents received updates from AFS reassuring them that I was safe, given the inevitable media reports of the fighting. I wonder if those updates were, in fact, reassuring to my parents, or whether they were alarmist.
I’m thinking of this because, as you may know by now, one of the students killed in the Texas school shooting was an exchange student, looking forward to getting home after what was surely a fascinating year, and I think about the trust that was placed in that school and community by her and her family. I think about how that community (and the state and federal governments) in particular failed this family, and I weep for her, her siblings and her family back home, and for her host family who were also betrayed, as well as for the others who suffered loss and trauma in this and other similar incidents.
I simply don’t understand how a nation can be so wilfully, criminally, negligent on behalf of their children … and, it seems, other people’s children … spurning, almost mocking, the trust that has been so sadly, it seems now, misplaced.
It’s baffling and tragic. I find myself looking at schools and thinking of them as potentially life-threatening places. (My mother’s apartment now overlooks one.) The Onion, in their sad brilliance, uses the same headline every time (and look at that? I have to say “every time”: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”) This year, this happened in Vermont, in my county:
https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/local/2018/04/25/fair-haven-school-shooting-plot-what-we-know-now/549728002/
How is U.S. tourism still a thing? Clearly this country is batshit crazy.
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Yikes, ignorance is bliss indeed. I heard about this latest school shooting on Friday and all I could think was, “Aren’t you tired of this, America?” 😦 And then the Lt.-Governor (?) of Texas was rambling on about how schools have too many entrances & exits and we need to build schools with fewer entry points. (I’m sure the fire department would have something to say about that…!) Anything except common sense gun control laws, right? 😦
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/its-the-guns/560771/
(David Frum is Canadian, btw 😉 although he now lives in the States and was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. )
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I’m an American and I feel the same way. And trying to talk to (most) of the people who are against the gun control laws? You’d have better luck banging your head into a brick wall and it would be more productive.
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Yes. You expect violence near a war zone. You don’t expect it (or maybe we do now) where children are supposed to be learning. I felt for that exchange student and all her families, and at the horrible bad fortune of being in that place, at that time. I don’t understand this epidemic. I don’t understand how actual solutions put out are to arm teachers and fix security loopholes in the buildings. Um, we’re supposed to turn me into a SWAT team member and fortify our schools against bullets, instead of actually doing something ABOUT THE BULLETS? It’s all so backwards. It is terrible to see the U.S. compared to nations that actually have common sense gun control. I never thought that as a teacher, I’d be in a dangerous profession where my life is on the line for my students and I have to practice what to do if we are shot at in school. So sad, and incredibly maddening. This post is so moving, and such a straightforward commentary on where things are now. Sigh.
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Your experiences as a foreign student sound amazing! What an interesting perspective… Given all the political and social upheaval of where you were situated, it would seem more likely that something catastrophic would happen to a student in that place at that time… in theory, the US should be so much safer than Khmer Rouge territory right? It should be… but it doesn’t seem like that’s true with the insane high numbers of school shootings. what a sad time for everyone.
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