{"id":1837,"date":"2019-05-03T11:19:59","date_gmt":"2019-05-03T15:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=1837"},"modified":"2020-04-23T16:55:19","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T20:55:19","slug":"who-can-hear-us-the-poway-synagogue-and-unc-charlotte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=1837","title":{"rendered":"Who Can Hear Us? The Poway Synagogue and UNC Charlotte"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tuesday, April 30th<\/sup>, my husband, Ralf, and I were driving to campus. It was just three few days after the attack on the Poway synagogue and the murder of Lori Kaye Gilbert. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was afraid. I was afraid to go and teach, again, the\nhistory of antisemitism, the way the Holocaust is marketed, the terrible\nrecurring history of hate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u201cI\u2019m thinking about\nthe cost of teaching these courses,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat if someone becomes\nradicalized, finds our course and its location, comes in to my classroom and\nstarts shooting at me and my students?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That day, I told the students in my antisemitism class that\nthey might be the last students to take the course. I explained why. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afterwards, I went to my office to see students. My last student\nof the day and I spoke about her growing strength, her own awareness that as a\nwoman of color she needs, as she said, \u201cto get loud.\u201d If you only knew her\nstory \u2013 if you only knew \u2013 then, you would know my pride in her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around 5 pm, she and I left the building, and hugged happy\ngoodbyes. I met my husband at his building and we walked toward the garage, got\ninto our car, and left campus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just about fifteen minutes later, as I was reading email on the way home, a message flashed on my phone screen. \u201cRun. Hide. Fight.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Campus was locked down. Frantically, I tried to understand. Kennedy,\nKennedy. Every report mentioned the Kennedy Building, the building I see when I\nlook out my office windows in Macy. At first it seemed that someone had shot\nstudents in the open gathering space outside Kennedy and outside Macy, too. I kept\nreplaying the minutes when I had been near that space with my student. She is\ntall. Would she have been easily shot? What would we have done? What would I\nhave done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I couldn\u2019t stop transposing time, even as I emailed with\nthat same student, who had returned to Macy for an evening class. She and her\nfellow students had just seen students running from the Kennedy Building, she\nwrote. One was bleeding from being shot. He had collapsed just at the entrance\nto Macy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A colleague who has the office next to mine was still working\nwhen the building was locked down. Later that night I learned that when she\nfinally got home the apartment complex was filled with reporters and police. The\nshooter lived a few floors above her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For days I have been emailing and texting with my beloved\nstudents. For days I have replayed the active shooter training my department\nhad the Monday after the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre. I keep putting myself\nin the actual room where the shooter murdered two of our students and shot four\nothers. I had a training for online teaching in that very room last summer.\nWhat would I have done? What would I have done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my students has experienced so much recent violence that I immediately worried about the triggering this would cause. I wrote to ask: How are you? I wrote my classes, multiple times. I sent links to counseling services, help lines. I wrote individual students. I gave out my home number. I heard from students who long-since graduated. From colleagues, from administrators as we untangled what to do about final exams, final projects, finals of any kind. (Forgive it all, let go, give students time to take care of themselves\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one who knows me does not know the measure of my love for\nmy students, for my department, for my beloved UNCC campus. Yet I was unable to\nprotect our students, my colleagues, our campus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday, April 30th<\/sup>, just hours before the\nshooting, one of the students in my course on gender and sexuality in Hebrew\nBible was assessing texts of violence we had studied. He said: \u201cSometimes, the\nsilent scream is the loudest.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been screaming for days without a single sound coming\nout of my mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one week right wing radicalism destroyed the peace of a\nJewish community and took the life of a woman at prayer. In that same week, two\nyoung people \u2013 two of UNCC\u2019s beloved students \u2013 were murdered. Four more were\nshot and injured. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no one on our campus who has not been assaulted. We\nare all screaming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who can hear us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around 5 pm, my student and I left the building, and hugged happy goodbyes. I met my husband at his building and we walked toward the garage, got into our car, and left campus.
\nJust about fifteen minutes later, as I was reading email on the way home, a message flashed on my phone screen. \u201cRun. Hide. Fight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[502,504,503,499,501,500],"class_list":["post-1837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gun-violence","tag-kennedy-building","tag-lori-kaye-gilbert","tag-poway-synagogue","tag-shooting","tag-unc-charlotte"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/adrenalinedrash.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Kennedy-vigil.jpg?fit=266%2C476&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1837"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1971,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1837\/revisions\/1971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}