Shootings Indicate Moral Wounds
There was a lot of talk here Thursday of the need to grieve, counsel and heal.
There’s no question that the entire community is grieving, said a composed and dignified Don Gellatly, principal of W.R. Myers High School. But we don’t all know how to deal with that.
Our first goal is that no one else gets hurt, Dr. Paul Hasselback said. He was outlining the mission of the team of crisis workers and counselors who began fanning out in the community only hours after two Grade 11 students were shot - one, 17-year-old Jason Lang, fatally - by a gunboy who entered their school armed with a .22 caliber, semiautomatic rifle. A local 14-year-old, who cannot be named under Canada’s Young Offenders Act, has been charged with one count of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.
Media coverage is known as a potential contributor to copycat behavior, Hasselback said, alluding to speculation that the Myers killer may have been influenced by the previous week’s slaughter at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
When this is over, and the satellite trucks have been sent to the next cataclysm, we will be left with the question: What is the media contribution to the tragic events we have experienced?
The second goal, Hasselback said, is to help students reintegrate and normalize in the long term.
Yet, of all the fine men who spoke to the press here Thursday, no one’s words were more poignant, meaningful or, indeed, intellectually profound than those spoken by Jason’s father, the Rev. Dale Lang of the Anglican church: “We grieve for our son, for this community and for the sad state of a 14-year-old boy who could come to such a place as randomly taking another person’s life for no reason,” said Lang, accompanied by Jason’s elder brother Jeff, whose birthday was Wednesday.
“There are no words to express how you feel at a time like this. A piece of your heart is gone and it won’t come back.”
“We pray that people will see from this that there are lots of things that have to change in our society. Lots of things need to be healed.”
He is correct.
For it is not just Taber which needs to heal. Taber alone does not need fixing, counseling and time to grieve. This is not, as has been repeated ad nauseum these past two days here, a big-city crime in a small town. As Taber police Constable Andrew Prokop put it: Anything can happen anywhere and we’re no different than anyone else.
The boy who did this did not simply materialize out of the mist. He didn’t just happen. We built him - all of us - brick by brick from the rubble of the institutions we chose to dismantle.
The killer is among the Frankensteins to have emerged from an age of relativism, self-defined morality and, now, complete confusion over what constitutes right and wrong beyond the context of what is merely legal and illegal.
But here in Taber, and likewise elsewhere, there are still people with the vocabulary required to end the era of deconstruction and begin a reconstruction.
One, clearly, is the terribly bereaved Rev. Lang.
Another is Harley Phillips, Taber’s mayor and former police chief.
“I think we have a problem,” Phillips said, unaware of his understatement. “We have to, as a society, find out what the problem is and correct it. It starts in your home. People have to be a lot more involved with their kids. Parents have to start sending their kids back to church and (for instance) we need to bring back the Lord’s Prayer in school.”
Asked what difference that could possibly make, Phillips didn’t miss a beat. “It gives them (children) something more to believe in beyond themselves. It teaches them that there is such a thing as right and wrong.”
The religious route may not be everyone’s solution, but it is certainly a more compelling argument than that put forward by one shaken 16-year-old, who, when asked on the school steps what people could learn from the terrible events of the week, could only offer that he hoped people learn not to bring a gun to school.
Certainly that is an eminently sensible idea. But the answers, to why Jason Lang is dead and what could have been done to keep his father’s heart from being so terribly broken, are not something that can be simply addressed by legislators, welcome though their contributions may be.
The anti-establishmentarianism of the currently ascendant generation demolished the societal foundations that those who went before had tended with so much care.
Yet they/we replaced it with a society based solely on the supremacy of the self and its hedonistic instincts. We are today living with the consequences of those decisions.
It is perhaps best, then, to leave the final word to Rev. Lang, who with swollen, tear-filled eyes and through trembling lips looked his country firmly in the eye Thursday and said: “May God have mercy on this broken society and all the hurting people in it.”