The theme of violence, especially against women and children, has really taken hold on these pages as a subject of conversation since, unfortunately, women in great numbers continue to suffer from violence or be exposed to it around the world. And if we don’t continue to raise our voices and point out incident after incident after incident after incident then surely there will never be a cessation of hostilities. But since I tend to be a micro person, seeing everything through the lens of my life, and trying to understand the big picture through the daily comings and goings of my life, I have to bring up another type of violence that we see far too often, a self-inflicted form of violence—suicide—that has “visited” my life in the past week. A boy at the high school where I teach committed suicide. For what is suicide if not violence against the self, and, perhaps, against society too? And the thoughts that have swirled around my head, though different than when contemplating violence inflicted on another, cause me to pause and contemplate how commonplace violence has become in our world.

The horror of a young man deciding to cut short his life was exacerbated, for me, when I heard my 12-year old daughter’s response to my telling her what had happened. I was going to use his tragic death as a segue to give her the “suicide is wrong and there is always a resolution to any problem” speech, but after I told her about what had happened, she looked at me and told me that a boy in her class this year had committed suicide. A seventh grade boy had committed suicide and a seventh grade girl hadn’t been upset enough about it to tell her mother that day when she got home from school. I was stunned. Stunned by the implicit acceptance of such a tragic act. Stunned by the non-stun factor this news was to her. Stunned from how sad it is that this is the world my daughter lives in. Every adult to whom I had told about this young man’s death had chills when I told him or her. But here, my sensitive daughter accepted it as part of the flow of life. It was not an aberration to her. And when I had my classes do a free write in the days following the suicide, only a few students commented on it—and those were generally children who had known him or knew someone who had known him. The others had either forgotten about it or it had never really entered their consciousness—both equally upsetting responses. (Granted, the school hadn’t stressed how he had died, but word gets around—if it did to the teachers, surely it did to the students.) So I guess the stun factor is the non-stun factor itself.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says that “suicide is the third leading cause of death (behind accidents and homicides) for teenagers. Each year more than 5,000 U.S. teenagers commit suicide.” And that doesn’t even touch on the number who attempt suicide or contemplate it, which apparently are highest in middle adolescence.

Which brought me to thinking about the meaning and purpose of life. Do too many of our children have none? (Do too many of us have none to transfer to them?) Do they not take life seriously since it is so often treated slightly in movies and TV and games? What is the point—a point—that will get them to see a point? I had seen middle age (admission here) as a time when I would be confronted with illness and death and sorrow, why are tweens and teens dealing each other—and themselves—these cards?

The killing fields of Cambodia might be over, but the killing fields in homes throughout the United States continue to sow blood and destruction. The latest (at least that I read about), was in Metropolitan Washington, DC, this past weekend. Unlike the killing fields of Cambodia created by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, I am talking about killing fields wrought by domestic dictators, for what else could you call a husband and father who kills his own children?

Dith Pran, the photographer who documented much of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia died yesterday. And on the same day that I read of his death, and recalled the horrors of the movie that was based on his life, The Killing Fields, I also read of a father in Maryland who killed his three children in a hotel room. Apparently, he and his wife were in the midst of divorce and child custody proceedings which were apparently what brought the father to this horrific act. According to the Washington Post,

“the mother tried to ‘keep them away’ from Mark Castillo [the father], Vanderwalde said. But he said the father fought for custody. In 2006, according to court records, Amy Castillo was granted temporary sole custody on an emergency motion, but Mark Castillo was granted visitation rights shortly afterward. At least twice last year, motions that would have withheld visitation rights were denied. At one point, according to the records, Amy Castillo was fined for refusing visitation rights.”

It seems apparent that someone in the court or family welfare system took the father’s word for more than the mother’s, or discounted the mother’s fears as overblown, or was upholding some absurd right of a father to be with his children regardless of a mother’s well-founded fears. Here is a mother who tried to use the system to protect her children, but it failed her! Why do these stories keep repeating themselves?! Why do we have to continually hear of domestic killing fields? When will the courts stop bending over backward to ensure that a father has the right to kill his children? When will a woman who spends her life trying to ensure her children’s lives finally be taken as seriously as she needs to be? The system has failed yet another family. And the blood of three children, aged 6, 4 and 2, are the latest victims to the domestic abuse and violence fields of the United States.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/30/AR2008033001242_2.html

Five years ago, when the announcement of the bombing of Baghdad was made, my husband, my two daughters and I were in a garden center in Virginia deciding which flowers to plant in the garden of the home we had purchased and moved into in the fall. Our lives seemed to be on an upward swing. We were hopeful. And for me, even the war seemed, at least initially, that it might accomplish something positive. I had, after all, lived in Israel during the first Gulf War and knew some of the dangers of Saddam’s administration. At the time I had been pregnant with my older daughter. (My mother had given me the book, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, but there was nothing in there about breathing exercises to stay calm in the face of air raid sirens and bombs bursting in air.)

But, in the five years that have transpired, things have not gone as planned—or hoped--either on the home front or the war front. I have gotten divorced in what has won me the “worst divorce story” among friends, and lawyers have claimed that my ex is the “worst” they have dealt with. And Iraq, surely a continual worst case scenario if ever there was one. Iraq’s devastation lays bare the need for a new word that can intimate the chaos, destruction, and failings of the war—of war itself, perhaps.

My mother keeps telling me that there is a light at the end of the tunnel of my life, but I keep telling her that the boulder stuck in the middle needs to move. Is there a light for Iraq? How have all of the vows and intentions failed so completely? How have we created a failed state?

My marriage ended when I finally realized that nothing I can do will change the man I had married into an empathetic and compassionate person instead of the controlling and abusive beast he had become. So, too, must we step out of the beast which Iraq has become (which we have made).

American service members and Iraqi civilians, alike, need to know that there is, indeed, a light at the end of the tunnel—so let’s work on moving the boulder out of the way by getting out of Iraq!