Every time the 9-11
anniversary rolls around, we see clips of the media coverage of that day
(sometimes, as in the case of MSNBC, they run their Today show coverage in real time).
I only need to watch a few minutes of those planes crashing into the
towers to feel my blood pressure rise and my heart rate skyrocket. Something about those people going to work in
the morning, like any other day, only to become victims of a most horrendous act. The falling people, followed by crumbling
buildings, and then the pile of burning, ashy rubble. The memories flood back. The rage follows me throughout the day, and I
wind up angry with myself for feeling the way I do. It seems that if I am enlightened and
balanced as a human being, I should not give into such primal instincts as
hatred for another. But in the same
breath, I also feel that rage is wholly justified given the circumstances. In short, I am again, as I was on that day, deeply
conflicted and disturbed, even though I am 3000 miles away and more than a decade
beyond the act itself.
As we head into
another school year, there is a debate among teachers, parents and students
regarding trigger warnings. When we hear
the word “school” and “trigger” we think of school shootings, and certainly a
school shooting might warrant a trigger warning when it is discussed in class,
but should students be warned ahead of time when the course content or the
discussion of that content might disturb people?
According to
an article in
The New York Times (May
17, 2014), “Colleges across the country…have been wrestling with student
requests for what are known as ‘trigger warnings,’ explicit alerts that the
material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as
some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in
victims of rape or in war veterans.”
Jennifer Medina, the author of the article, goes on to say “The debate
has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use
common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate.
Trigger warnings, they say, suggest a certain
fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to challenge, not embrace.”
I’m wondering, given
recent events, if life should not come with a trigger warning. The twisted bodies, some still strapped to
their airline seats, victims of a missile fired at a commercial plane over
war-torn Ukraine. The torn and
fragmented bodies on the dusty streets of Israel and Gaza. The murder of an unarmed black teenager in
Missouri. The dead mounting up in
dreadfully understaffed and under-equipped hospitals in Africa, the victims of
Ebola. The poor souls, some dead, some
barely alive, huddled on mountains and in desert canyons, hiding from ISIS
militants intent on killing every last person.
School shootings, murders of innocents, rapes, torture, brutality,
cruelty to animals—all every day occurrences, all need trigger warnings.
One of the first
harrowing and controversial sets of photographs depicting a news event was
carried in newspapers across the country in the 1970s.
They were taken by Stanley Forman of the
Boston Herald American. (For a good analysis, read
Nora Ephron’s essay in the November 1975 issue of
Esquire
entitled, “The Boston Photographs.”)
The
three pictures show a fire fighter rescuing a woman and her child on a fire
escape, smoke and heat swirling around them.
In the second frame, something goes horribly wrong.
The iron staircase pulls away from the
building, and all three—fireman, woman and child—plummet to earth.
The fireman catches a rung of the extension
ladder and saves himself.
The toddler’s
fall was broken by the woman’s body so the child survived.
The mother did not.
According to Ephron, the newspapers debated
whether to run the pictures.
“They are
pictures of death,” Ephron writes, “of that split second when luck runs out,
and it is impossible to look at them without feeling their extraordinary impact
and remember, in an almost subconscious way, the morbid fantasy of falling,
falling off a building, falling to one’s death.”
She ends her essay with these words:
“they are great pictures, breathtaking
pictures of something that happened.
That
they disturb readers is exactly as it should be…”
When I was teaching
eighth grade in a Catholic school, a “Right-to-Life” group sent me a carton of
full color brochures of various burned and dismembered fetuses to distribute to
my eighth grade students as a way of proving that abortion is murder. I opened the box and felt as if someone had smashed
me in the back of the head with a baseball bat.
I guess my horror and nausea would mean the organization had a
successful campaign on its hands. I thought
it shameful, and I refused to distribute the material. I got more mileage out of teaching them that
every human life matters, and that every human being has the potential to
better the world, and that is why abortion is wrong. I taught them that actions come with consequences,
and they must be prepared to take responsibility for their actions so that
innocent babies are not destroyed. Beheaded,
mutilated children were horrors that would overwhelm the lesson with abstract gore
and violence. The subject of Roe versus
Wade, of abortion versus life, is more complicated and nuanced than that. I thought the issue, and my students,
deserved something better, something more balanced and less traumatizing. Something they could relate to, there on the
cusp of young adulthood and a future of difficult decisions in a confusing
world. Abortion is a moral issue, not
just about dilation and curettage.
Should students
receive trigger warnings in a classroom if something disturbing will be
presented? Should literature teachers
slap warnings on books with traumatic scenes?
Do students need to be protected from bad things, disturbing images,
violence and bloodshed? As a responsible
instructor, if I were to show a film with graphic violence or bloodshed, I
would mention it to the class beforehand.
I certainly would not force a student to watch something he or she did
not want to watch, and I would be sensitive to the needs of my students. Good teaching and life-changing experiences
in the classroom mean teachers must challenge thinking, awaken young minds,
push people to confront unpopular truths about themselves, about the world in
which they live and help them make the moral or ethical choice.
“Do I dare disturb the
universe,” T.S. Eliot asks
in his famous poem.
I would argue that we should be disturbed every day of our lives.
We witness human beings committing acts of
atrocity on their fellow human beings, on animals, on nature, on our
planet.
We are duplicitous, violent
creatures who often use our much-ballyhooed higher order thinking skills to do
some of the worst evil imaginable.
In
short, it is a big bad world out there with some very nasty people.
But there is good, too, and truth, and
beauty, and moments of pure grace and exhilaration.
But without the darkness, would we know the
light?
We
can be cautious and prepare our students for the difficult,
traumatic experiences they will encounter in this life.
But we
cannot
coddle them or sell them a sugar-coated vision of a world that does not exist.
We must be sensitive to our students’ needs,
but we should not fail to teach them the truth.
Life is hard and mean, but it is beautiful and magnificent, too,
sometimes all together in the same instant.