I heard they shot a kid today
- Dawn Aulet
- Nov 8, 2016
- 2 min read
I teach teenage boys in shades that range from Crayola flesh to dark as night, turn on the light, I am afraid for his safety.
Walking out of school the other day, I greet a passerby with an "hello."
“Did you hear there was a shooting?”
“No.”
“Down by that gas station; A kid got shot 8 times.”
I don’t know if I responded out loud. But I got in my car. And I searched the news. Please don’t let it be one of my kids that was shot. Please don’t let it be one of my kids that pulled the trigger.
I like them. All of them. Any one of them could change the world.
Later, the news reports that the person shot was 20. No. condition. report. available.
Is it bad that I exhaled? I know it is. You don’t have to tell me. It is bad that I exhaled.
Some of these students are only two short years away from 20. How far are they from that gas station down there? How far are they from dodging bullets? Pulling a gun? Aiming? Shooting?
I have two kids of my own – 13 and 11. And while the little box they would check on a college application would say Hispanic, they look as white as I do.
So it was ironic or perhaps scary, maybe eye opening, that one day when I was cleaning out my car, I found a squirt gun that my 13-year-old had painted for a Halloween costume. The squirt gun used to be orange. Now it was black and it looked like a Glock and I thought, this gun could get my child killed.
And I thought for a moment that I had just a smidgen of a feeling that a black mom had for her black boy who is in danger of getting shot for nothing at all.
And I thought, well my kid is white, I have privilege, I don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. But I took the gun out from underneath the seat of my car and I put it in my underwear drawer, where my 13-year-old is sure to never go looking for it.
Because I might be white and I might have privilege, but I don’t want to take my chances. You see, there are gas stations on every corner now and 20-year-olds that fall dead in a hail of bullets that were not even meant for them. Death comes whether or not you are at the bus stop where the grim reaper stakes his claim.
For today, though, my students are safe, their weapons of choice are words, spouted on a stage or written on a page with the fury that will hopefully keep them from the desperation of reaching for a gun.
And my children, I hope that despite the paint, their years of bright orange squirt guns last just a little bit longer, that they wait a couple more years before they rifle through any one’s underwear drawer, man or woman and that the gas station on the corner is the place where they fill their tanks and buy their sodas and walk away to learn what it is to be a boy who grows into a man.
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