With candles and prayers for all of us, we are posting a letter by the poetess Dajana Petrović, commenting on the tragic elementary school shooting.
iFamNews Serbian editorial
“…The young does not respect the elderly,
But young people are smarter,
The weak is not supported by the strong,
But broken by him until he breaks entirely…”
St. Nikolai Velimirovich, “Heavenly Liturgy”
Quoted on the tragic 3 May 2023
I’m trying to understand that which has been inomprehensible, until this morning. I’m afraid. I am silent. I can barely breathe. My head is exploding. But I also feel a responsibility… I’m trying to summarize my thoughts and feelings, I’ve been writing this for several hours now. I give up. I delete everything. Yet…
I have worked in a school and occasionally I still teach religion as a substitue teacher. Recently, in the middle of the lesson, in the seventh grade, in a wonderful city school, a boy interrupted me in my presentation by standing up, obviously moved, and announcing: “Teacher, no one has talked to us like this since we started school,” he thanked me and sat down. Shocked, I recount this event as if I were a member of an extinct species, as some kind of an alien, to myself and my friends, and I wonder if this is possible? Or is it just that I’m not yet worn out, or I have the ability to understand others… I don’t know what it is. But I know that a lesson of 45 minutes once a week is not enough to talk to them and say that they are valuable, that they are needed, that God believes in them even when they don’t believe in Him… etc.
In the school, which I love, there is a lot of tension, pressure from all sides. Children are mostly unhappy, or overprotected or neglected, and their teachers are bitter. Parents are always on guard. They take care of their darlings, or they are not interested in the child, so they leave him at school and on the street… Someone from outside has made them fall out with each other.
All in all, it could have been foreseen that this would happen. Children are not taught to deal with themselves and others, to deal with those who are different from themselves. More and more often, young people can’t stand a blow, a word, being left behind, and they turn on themselves. Children are no longer allowed to have a quarrel at school. Even if they do quarrel and reconcile, their parents never learn. Great vanity reigns, and at the same time, parents are putting phones in their children’s hands while they are feeding them. Children are in complete chaos, abandoned by immature parents, or at best they are filling the emptiness between (divorced) parents with their own emptiness.
The school either does not react at all, so the parents overreact to every childhood squabble (which sometimes, you will admit, is necessary in order for kids to learn that not everything goes smoothly and easily in life, and to learn to reconcile and forgive), and immediately everything is raised to a higher level, therefore it was only a matter of days when someone somewhere would get to that final straw.
I also understand that teachers are humiliated… And demotivated. Reluctant to delve into the problems of the individual and very often they simply write off the case in advance, because they do not believe that anything can be changed. This is immediately followed by a story about unhappy and bad parents, neglect, illnesses, discord… About overprotection. And the end. (The child remains a case in itself, who, hopefully, will go to some high school to pull out a chair for some teacher there – a reference to a recent incident in a Serbian high school, ed.)
How should you feel in a bad environment, except that you are constantly guilty and bad. That you are a criminal, and not a child who needs affirmation and understanding. And escape from the rotten reality is within reach, it’s all there, right in front of your nose. Everything can be learned on Tiktok, YouTube, by watching crime series and movies full of evil…
And now what? We will cry for three days. And continue to sink into mud…?! On the 8th of May, we can relax and fall asleep with “our representative” for the Eurovision Song Contest? (Before that with basketball.) No one should suffer because of the failed Serbian education system and family, except for them…
And the lives of these unfortunate children, and their school security guard, are ended. That boy’s life is also ended the moment he made a pact with the unholy and started planning this bloody feast. He has been through hell… And he’s still there.
Is there a greater hell than when a child goes crazy and starts to deal with the world around him, with the world he perceives as the greatest enemy and threat…?
Children, someone has made you fall out with each other. I think we all know the name of that evil.
May God have mercy on us, may God embrace and understand us all.
Peace to the souls of the injured children!
Because theirs is the Kingdom…
Lord, Lord, Lord,
save the rest!
Dajana Petrović
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