PITTSBURG – Last week in Parkland, Florida, demolition equipment began to demolish the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School building, where a 2018 gunman attack ended with 17 people dead. As the thunder of destruction echoedpeople in the community began to explain exactly why demolishing the building was so significant – and so crucial.
From former student Bryan Lequerique: “It’s something we all need. It’s time to put an end to this very painful chapter in everyone’s lives.” And Eric Garner, professor of broadcasting and film, said, “For six and a half years we have looked at this monument to mass murder that stands on campus every day . …So coming down, that’s the monumental event.”
Park. Uvalde. Columbine. Sandy Hook. A supermarket in Buffalo. A church in South Carolina. A synagogue in Pittsburgh. A nightclub in Orlando, Florida. When violence reaches a public place, as happens frequently In our time, a delicate question remains silent: what should be done with the buildings where blood was spilled, where lives were destroyed, where loved ones were lost forever?
Which is the appropriate choice – the challenge of keeping them standing or the deep comfort that can come from wiping them off the map? Is it better to keep the pain right in front of us or at a distance?
This question has been answered differently over the years.
The most obvious example in recent history is the decision to preserve the concentration camps run by Nazi Germany during World War II, where millions of Jews and others died – an approach consistent with the post-Holocaust mantras of “never forget” and “ never”. ” But this was an event of global importance, with significance both for the descendants of the survivors and for the general public.
For individual American communities, approaches have varied. Parkland and others chose demolition. In Pittsburgh, the Tree of Life the synagogue, site of a 2018 shooting, was demolished to make way for a new sanctuary and memorial.
But the Top Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York, and Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where mass racist shootings occurred, both have reopened. And Columbine High School still exists, although its library, where so much bloodshed occurred, has long been replaced. passionate debate. “Finding a balance between its function as a high school and the need for memorialization has been a long process,” former student Riley Burkhart wrote earlier this year in a statement. rehearsal.
What happens in these decisions? Not just emotion and heartbreak. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of resources; Not all school districts can afford to demolish and rebuild. Sometimes it’s about not wanting to give those who might support the shooter a place to focus your attention.
“Denying these opportunities to those who celebrate the persecution and killing of people unlike themselves is a perfectly sound reason to demolish buildings where mass murders have occurred,” said Daniel Fountain, a history professor at Meredith College in North Carolina, via e -mail. .
Perhaps the most significant driving force is the growing discussion in recent years about the role of mental health.
“There are changing norms about things like trauma and closure that are at play that today encourage the notion of demolishing these spaces,” said Timothy Recuber, a sociologist at Smith College in Massachusetts and author of “Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America’s Decade of Disaster.”
For many years, he said, “the prevailing idea of how to get over a tragedy was to put your head down and get over it. Today, people are more likely to believe that having to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak, is likely to inflict harm again.”
In Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, a fence masks the site of the Tree of Life synagogue until it was destroyed. devastated earlier this year, more than five years after a gunman killed 11 people in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history.
David Michael Slater grew up across the street from the synagogue. He understands the ambivalence that can arise when deciding whether or not to take down.
“It’s easy to see why decision-makers might have chosen one path or another. And to me, it seems presumptuous that anyone who is not part of or directly affected by the choice would question that,” said Slater, who retired this month after 30 years of teaching middle and high school English. “That said, the decision to demolish such sites, when viewed in the context of our growing culture of erasure, should raise concern.”
In Second World War for 11/09, The politics of American memory are powerful—and nowhere more complex than in the case of mass shootings. The loss of loved ones, social disagreements over gun laws and different approaches to protecting children create a scenario where the smallest issue can give rise to dozens of passionate and angry opinions.
For some, keeping a building standing is the biggest challenge: it is neither bowing to the horror nor capitulating to those who caused it. You are choosing to carry on in the face of unimaginable circumstances – a common thread in the American narrative.
For others, the possibility of being retraumatized is central. Why, the thinking goes, should a building where people met violent ends continue to be a looming force—literally—in the lives of those who must continue?
It stands to reason, then, that a key factor in deciding the fate of such buildings coalesces around one question: who is the public?
“It’s not a simple choice between demolishing, renovating or leaving as is,” said Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who studies how people form personal memories of public events.
“If we are interested in the memories of people who directly experienced the event, this physical space will serve as a specific and powerful reminder. But if we’re talking about remembering or commemorating an event for other people, those who didn’t experience it, that’s a slightly different calculation,” said Talarico. “Remembering and forgetting are powerful forces.”
Ultimately, of course, there is a compromise: eliminate the building itself, but erect a lasting memorial to those who were lost, as Uvalde and other communities have chosen. In this way, the virtues of mental health and memory can be honored. Life can go on – not unconsciously, but not hindered by a daily, visceral reminder of the suffering that once visited him.
That approach sits well with Slater, who has contemplated such tragedies both from the vantage point of his hometown synagogue and the classrooms where he spent decades teaching and keeping children safe.
“Like all important problems in life, simple answers are difficult to come by,” Slater said. “If whatever replaces the Tree of Life, or the Park, or the next contaminated place of worship, learning, or commerce, can serve both as proof of our indomitable spirit and as memorialized evidence of what we strive to overcome, perhaps we will have the best of the two worst worlds.”
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Ted Anthony, director of new narratives and newsroom innovation at the Associated Press, has been writing about American culture for 35 years and covered the Columbine High School shooting. Follow him on
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