Daily Kos: Life among the Ruins

Daily Kos: Life among the Ruins:

Life among the Ruins

byplthomasEdD

Adrienne Rich's The School Among the Ruins [1] confronts the intersection of school and violence, poems written in the time designated as the turn of a century:

"Rich cited another catalyst for 'The School Among the Ruins' in an e-mail interview from her Santa Cruz home -- the school, in Brooklyn, where her son teaches.

"'I knew his love for the school, for those children,' she said.

[The volume is s]et during a nonspecific wartime in which children and their teachers are hostages to horror."

We are now faced again with the incomprehensible intersection of children, teachers, schools, and unspeakable violence. It is ours to honor those taken from us by seeking the rational among the irrational.

Seeking the Rational among the Irrational

Let us commit ourselves to a vigilance, to protecting this moment against the petty, against the call to heap irrational upon irrational, against allowing the needed confrontations and