Pray for Peace
12/12/12 05:29
For a decade between 1985 and 1995, I made a lot of trips from Boise, Idaho to Portland Oregon. At least once a year, I’d make the trip with a vanload of youth bound for Camp Adams for a youth retreat of the Central Pacific Conference of the United Church of Christ. A 450-mile trip with a van load of youth sometimes means that you have a bit of extra time, and a common stop, when we had time was the Clackamas Town Center Mall. It is easy to access, right off of Interstate 205, which runs around Portland on the southeast side.
In the late 1980’s Boise still lacked a large indoor shopping mall, and the multi-story Clackamas Town Center was a fascination to our kids. A typical vanload in those days was 12 kids and 2 adults, and we could let the kids wander in pairs around the mall, setting an appointed meeting place, usually the food court. We knew our kids would be safe, that they had limited funds to spend, and that we would soon be on our way to camp and the adventures of the weekend. In those days before any of us had cell phones, I knew that I could trust my kids to arrive at a prearranged location at a preset time. I didn’t worry if there were a few minutes when they were out of my sight. They deserved the chance to explore the mall. The trip home wouldn’t involve any extra time for stopping as we would be trying to get home as soon as possible after a full weekend of youth events.
One of the attractions of the mall in those days was that it featured an ice skating rink. An indoor ice rink was a real novelty in those days and sometimes I would rent a pair of blades and skate around as we waited for our youth. The rink held the additional possibility of getting to watch Tonya Harding practicing her skating. Tonya was the first American woman to complete a triple axel jump in competition. She won the U.S. Figure Skating Championship in 1991 and placed second in the World Championships. She was good.
That was, of course, before 1994, when her ex-husband and her body guard hired Shane Stant to break the leg of her skating competitor Nancy Kerrigan at a practice session during the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. The leg wasn’t broken, but the bruise from the tire iron forced her to withdraw from the national championship. Harding won the championship, but she later admitted to helping cover up the attack. Through a series of legal maneuvers, she managed to remain on the U.S. Olympic Skating team. She finished eighth in Lillehammer. Kerrigan, to the cheers of the crowd won silver in those Olympics.
The incident sort of took the luster out of skating at Clackamas Town Center and in a later remodel, the mall eliminated the skating rink. I moved to South Dakota and haven’t visited the Mall in a long time. When I am in the Portland area these days if I head to a Mall, I usually go to Washington Square, on the other side of the city, where my niece works.
Still, news of a shooting incident at Clackamas Town Center yesterday caught my attention. It was just a bit too close to home. Three people died in the shooting including the gunman, who appeared to have shot himself. No police weapons were discharged in the incident. When I went to bed last night, a 15-year-old was still in surgery following being shot in the chest.
Over the years, I’ve turned quite a few 15-year-olds loose in that mall. Of course that was then and this is now. Some of those then 15-year-olds are now in their 40’s. with children of their own. I haven’t committed to traveling 900 miles in a van with high school students in a single weekend for quite a few years. And the Clackamas Town Center has gotten older and probably the malls in Boise are newer and fancier. I doubt if today’s youth would be impressed by the center any more. They’ve got Macy’s and REI at home these days.
But I am hungry for the days when we didn’t have to worry about someone getting shot when they went to the food court at a shopping mall. I am hungry for the days before we had learned of mass shootings at high schools. I am hungry for the days when we could get dozens of youth to commit multiple weekends during the school year solely to church activities. I am hungry for some of the things that have changed and may never come back.
Maybe I’m just getting old. I know that the world has changed and that all of my nostalgia doesn’t alter reality. I know that the lives of our teens are far busier than they once were. I know that church is much less at the center of the lives of many of our families than previously was the case. I know that the dangers teens face today are very real. I know that we can’t protect them from all of the harsh realities of modern society.
But I cringe when I hear of the violence that has become a present companion in our modern lives. While news of the incident in the mall was readily available on the Internet last night, it isn’t in the headlines of the BBC, The New York Times or the Washington Post this morning. It just isn’t big enough news for those agencies. Only 3 people died. I don’t even know how the word “only” can be used in such a sentence.
Trying to figure out what was going on, I turned to Oregon Live, the newsfeed of the Portland Oregonian last night. Their feed had a collection of updates from Twitter of the shooting at the Mall even before it was known how many had died. There were notes from people huddled in the back of a beauty salon, from employees locked down in store, from someone stuck in the back room at build a bear, and from a person in their car after running out of a restaurant into the parking lot. I had to quit reading the tweets.
We live in a dangerous world. And we are bringing up our grandchildren in a dangerous world. Teaching them to be safe includes thinking of shelter and escape plans in the event of shootings in public places.
The popular Christmas, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” was written during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was said that the songwriters were unable to perform it without crying. 50 years later it still brings tears to eyes. And its message is as clear today as it was then. “Pray for peace, people everywhere.”
In the late 1980’s Boise still lacked a large indoor shopping mall, and the multi-story Clackamas Town Center was a fascination to our kids. A typical vanload in those days was 12 kids and 2 adults, and we could let the kids wander in pairs around the mall, setting an appointed meeting place, usually the food court. We knew our kids would be safe, that they had limited funds to spend, and that we would soon be on our way to camp and the adventures of the weekend. In those days before any of us had cell phones, I knew that I could trust my kids to arrive at a prearranged location at a preset time. I didn’t worry if there were a few minutes when they were out of my sight. They deserved the chance to explore the mall. The trip home wouldn’t involve any extra time for stopping as we would be trying to get home as soon as possible after a full weekend of youth events.
One of the attractions of the mall in those days was that it featured an ice skating rink. An indoor ice rink was a real novelty in those days and sometimes I would rent a pair of blades and skate around as we waited for our youth. The rink held the additional possibility of getting to watch Tonya Harding practicing her skating. Tonya was the first American woman to complete a triple axel jump in competition. She won the U.S. Figure Skating Championship in 1991 and placed second in the World Championships. She was good.
That was, of course, before 1994, when her ex-husband and her body guard hired Shane Stant to break the leg of her skating competitor Nancy Kerrigan at a practice session during the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. The leg wasn’t broken, but the bruise from the tire iron forced her to withdraw from the national championship. Harding won the championship, but she later admitted to helping cover up the attack. Through a series of legal maneuvers, she managed to remain on the U.S. Olympic Skating team. She finished eighth in Lillehammer. Kerrigan, to the cheers of the crowd won silver in those Olympics.
The incident sort of took the luster out of skating at Clackamas Town Center and in a later remodel, the mall eliminated the skating rink. I moved to South Dakota and haven’t visited the Mall in a long time. When I am in the Portland area these days if I head to a Mall, I usually go to Washington Square, on the other side of the city, where my niece works.
Still, news of a shooting incident at Clackamas Town Center yesterday caught my attention. It was just a bit too close to home. Three people died in the shooting including the gunman, who appeared to have shot himself. No police weapons were discharged in the incident. When I went to bed last night, a 15-year-old was still in surgery following being shot in the chest.
Over the years, I’ve turned quite a few 15-year-olds loose in that mall. Of course that was then and this is now. Some of those then 15-year-olds are now in their 40’s. with children of their own. I haven’t committed to traveling 900 miles in a van with high school students in a single weekend for quite a few years. And the Clackamas Town Center has gotten older and probably the malls in Boise are newer and fancier. I doubt if today’s youth would be impressed by the center any more. They’ve got Macy’s and REI at home these days.
But I am hungry for the days when we didn’t have to worry about someone getting shot when they went to the food court at a shopping mall. I am hungry for the days before we had learned of mass shootings at high schools. I am hungry for the days when we could get dozens of youth to commit multiple weekends during the school year solely to church activities. I am hungry for some of the things that have changed and may never come back.
Maybe I’m just getting old. I know that the world has changed and that all of my nostalgia doesn’t alter reality. I know that the lives of our teens are far busier than they once were. I know that church is much less at the center of the lives of many of our families than previously was the case. I know that the dangers teens face today are very real. I know that we can’t protect them from all of the harsh realities of modern society.
But I cringe when I hear of the violence that has become a present companion in our modern lives. While news of the incident in the mall was readily available on the Internet last night, it isn’t in the headlines of the BBC, The New York Times or the Washington Post this morning. It just isn’t big enough news for those agencies. Only 3 people died. I don’t even know how the word “only” can be used in such a sentence.
Trying to figure out what was going on, I turned to Oregon Live, the newsfeed of the Portland Oregonian last night. Their feed had a collection of updates from Twitter of the shooting at the Mall even before it was known how many had died. There were notes from people huddled in the back of a beauty salon, from employees locked down in store, from someone stuck in the back room at build a bear, and from a person in their car after running out of a restaurant into the parking lot. I had to quit reading the tweets.
We live in a dangerous world. And we are bringing up our grandchildren in a dangerous world. Teaching them to be safe includes thinking of shelter and escape plans in the event of shootings in public places.
The popular Christmas, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” was written during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was said that the songwriters were unable to perform it without crying. 50 years later it still brings tears to eyes. And its message is as clear today as it was then. “Pray for peace, people everywhere.”