Caution and Compassion: My Cup of Tea
It’s been a roller coaster of a day. My DH offered (for the second morning in a row!) to get up before me and do the school drop offs. Yay for me, since we have kids in three different schools. I was surprised when he came home 20 minutes later with our middle schooler. They had been turned away from the school.
Just then, both our cell phones and home phone rang at the same time. The simultaneous rings and tweets were eerie and ominous. DH put the home phone on speaker, where we listened to a robocall informing us that the middle school had been closed due to a “police incident.” To say the call was a little late is an understatement.
A second call followed the first, this one from an actual person who was making sure we had plans to pick up our other middle school son. He does math at the high school first thing in the morning and is usually bused back to his home school. I asked her if I could help in any way and she laughed, saying no one had ever offered to help before in this kind of situation.
I don’t know what she meant by “this kind of situation”, but the horrible facts of a decapitated body found in the park behind the school unfolded in news reports throughout the day. Parents and students were stunned and hungry for answers that were slow in coming, but it came to light that the man had been killed by a pipe bomb and a second bomb had been found nearby, later detonated by the Cook County Sheriff’s Bomb Unit.
I felt compassion for the police commander who, like all our officials in these days of instant information gratification, was expected to tell everything he knew as soon as he knew it so it could be broadcast and Twittered about immediately.
I also felt frustrated by our city official’s sidesteps of questions that seemed logical and important to me. When asked by reporters if they were concerned about the safety of the children, the response was “We are always concerned about safety. That’s what we do.” When pushed further and asked if he was any more concerned than usual about the safety of the children who attend the school on the same grounds where a body and bombs had been found, he replied: “Well, this is a very highly unusual circumstance, so it goes hand in hand with that.”
Those are not answers that concerned parents needed to hear. Scary or not, what we needed was a direct statement: “Yes, we are concerned about the proximity to the school. No, we haven’t ruled out a direct connection. Yes, our ongoing investigation has led us to decide it is best to keep the school closed for at least one more day. We will keep you posted.”
I feel compassion for the teachers and staff who faced this chaos first thing in the morning and seemed to handle the onsite redirection with efficiency and calm. I’m sure it was a traumatic day. I still want to know, since the decision to close the school was reportedly made at 7:45, why was the robocall not activated until 8:40, nearly an hour after the decision and 10 full minutes after the start of school. Two bombs and a dead body had been found on site, and yet the bulk of the student and teacher population showed up because they didn’t know. As the police commander noted repeatedly in his press conference, the investigation is ongoing. Children should not have been allowed anywhere near that building this morning where a live bomb was still on the grounds.
I felt compassion for working parents who scrambled to retrieve their children and find childcare for the day (now two days). I tried to help by posting notices of community resources available: our local Y opened their doors for both days even to nonmembers; the library teen loft opened; the three community centers offered free basketball and open gym. A friend reminded us on her Facebook post that, no matter the circumstances behind his death, the family of the deceased man deserved our kind thoughts in their time of sorrow.
On the other hand, I was outraged to see a local mom Twitter “Chicago gang violence metasticizes [sic]? Headless body found this a.m. in Evanston near middle school.” This went out very early in the day, between 8 and 9 a.m., before much of anything was known, using the hashtags #teaparty, #illinois and #sgp (“smart girl politics — the home on the internet for conservative women and grassroots politics”).
I don’t know what kind of smart girls follow this woman, but the smart girls I know don’t start rumors, don’t turn local tragedies into political warfare before any facts are known, and are more concerned with the safety of their community than for any kind of tea party, political or otherwise.
In the wake of tragedy, a little caution and lot of compassion go a long way.
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Category: Mom Challenges, School
The tweet is the problem with so much going on today, isn’t it? We don’t wait for facts. We just throw out anything so we can connect it with our own political agenda. Do you ever read the comment boards on the newspapers? EVERYTHING is political. If possible, it’s all about fear politics. Caution and compassion are thrown out the window to keep followers and gain attention. Tragedies are now nothing more than an opportunity to make a name for yourself for people like the woman who tweeted trying to connect the situation with Chicago gangs. In reality, she’s naive to think that there aren’t any gangs already in Evanston (or any suburb). Does she think gangs stop at the Chicago border and say, “Ooops, can’t go there. It’s Evanston.” Of course, that’s a topic for another day.
So true, Shari. We live in polarized time where everything is co-opted for political ideology. I hesitated to even mention the Tweet because I did not want to grant the negative attention. My son schooled me this morning on “Trolls” — people who hang out in chat rooms and on forums just to pick a fight. “Mom, the best thing to do is ignore them.” Probably should have heeded his advice.
It’s a good reminder about how cold and calculating people can be. We’d like to think that mature, reasonably intelligent adults would have the proper focus during an emergency (Are the kids at the school safe? Compassion for the dead man.), but the reality is that some people will take any opportunity to promote themselves.
Good work Susan. You are so able to put into words that which concerns so many mothers and fathers out there who can only sit in horror as one atrocity after another take over our lives.
I love to read your blogs, but then who wouldn’t. Or does being your mother have something to do with it?
Mom
By the way, have a happy happy you know which day. I’ll never tell.
Thanks, Mom. Somehow it always feels like the moms should be celebrated on birthdays, not the children. So happy my birthday to you, too.
Sad update reveals that the victims family believes he committed suicide. My deepest condolences to them. http://evanston.patch.com/articles/bomb-casualtys-family-we-know-that-colin-committed-suicide
This tweeter using fear, violence and misinformation is an example of a twisted mind at work. Lunatics are like cicadas – they are noisy, everywhere and a nuisance – but unlike cicadas they spread dangerous words around and should be arrested for yelling fire in a crowded theater. Her 26 malevolent words should be enough to get her taken off Twitter.
Pipe bombs, a decapitated body endangering children and lack of information from the police is a panic producing situation all by itself. Out of nowhere, as was written about so well, the parent/child/administrator/police and everyone else is put into a terrible and unfamiliar situation and everyone tries to protect the kids first and then figure out what to do.
Evanston does what it does – it helps others by opening community centers, the Y etc. while dealing with this tragedy and wondering, what next? Facts soothe – at least you know exactly what is going on – it is why we all watched TV endlessly during 9/11.
The police need to provide facts, facts and more facts. Someone at the high school needs to send out their robocall immediately and parents, working or not, need to be informed quickly so they can make whatever arrangements they need to make.
Going forward I am sure these things will be worked on, but in the meantime, we are all left wondering, what the heck is going on.
As for gangs – they are everywhere in rural America it has become a real problem. This level of violence is something else though and we need information and facts immediately.
Thanks for blogging so well about the details of these events. Every person should be on the police department insisting on information – the more pressure we apply for actual information the sooner we will get it.
[...] threats at two different Evanston public schools. To add to that, the Evanston police also found a decapitated man next to detonated explosives at one of the middle [...]