They did the same horseshit here in Milwaukee after the Jeffrey Dahmer thing. Tore down a perfectly good house because “something bad” had happened in it.
To me it just seems on par with superstition.
There are people who are in the market for a house that wouldn’t buy a specific one because the previous owner died of a heart attack in the his bed? It’s the same kind of thinking and it’s stupid! Do they tear down a highway everytime someone dies in a terrible traffic accident?
If it was my tax money being spent in Newtown I’d be pissed!
Hey, man-the pattern’s right there! Just like the inner city white-on-white violence that THE MAN covered up about that Abe Lincoln thing in Washington DC! How much have you read about that lately? If there is anything about it, it’s jammed in that back pages. How much more do you need???
I don’t see why they couldn’t redo the entrance and tear out a few walls so as to redesign the areas where the massacre took place. Tearing it to the ground seems the definition of excessive.
Its a ritual of destruction and renewal, symbolically cleansing a place of its negative history.
In a more homogenouslyreligious culture, or without a money genie, they’d just have a guy ina robe walk through chanting and splashing holy water or some crap around.
I think that understates the nature of the issue. It’s fair not to ask this year’s kindergarten class to set in the same first grade class next year where X number of kids were massacred. That would have a psychological effect on adults, let alone little kids.
You can’t just clean up and then ask teachers, administrators, and children to go on like nothing happened. But likewise, demolishing a perfectly good building is too much. If it absolutely cannot be reopened, why not sell the school for office space and use that money to rebuild down the road (hopefully at a cost of far less than $50 million).
I’m not sure who is going to pay to set up an office there. And selling that the school (or its components) may just feel distasteful to the people there.
Fair enough. But surely there is some more productive use for the building than demolishing it. It seems like excessive waste. I want to be sensitive to those parents as well, but not $50M worth of sensitivity.
To be fair, a heart attack isn’t quite the same as a horrible gruesome murder. And we’re not talking about someone buying a house. I can understand the difficulty involved in sending small children back into a building where they saw their friends killed. There’s got to be a whole lot of post-traumatic stress involved. I know I’d have a hard time sitting in a classroom and learning if I could look over at the doorway and remember a shooter standing there.
Still, I’m not sure that tearing down the school and pulverizing it is the answer here. Maybe a remodel would be enough, to make it look different inside and keep the classrooms from triggering terrible memories in those kids. But I’m not an expert.
In a way it’s overkill, but I can also understand why they went about it this way. I can’t find much fault with them for doing so.
I think if you’re going to be sensitive to people trying to recover from a horrible tragedy, you probably shouldn’t put a price tag on the sensitivity. I don’t know how they arrived at the final dollar figure but I’ll assume they chose a course of action and decided to keep the costs as low as they reasonably could.
What if it had cost $500 million? $5 billion? $50 billion? Would you say the price tag we should put on our sensitivity in this case should be less than fifty billion dollars?
I don’t really understand the American mentality here. I mean, I’ve eaten in restaurants and coffee shops that have been hit by suicide bombings - mostly, they just cleaned up, renovated a bit and opened again as quickly as possible. To do otherwise would have been admitting defeat.
We accept defeat all the time, and just call it victory. Terrorists induce the government to infringe upon our rights? Victory! Can’t find ObL? Attack another country. Mission Accomplished!
I think that we all Want To Do Something, but doing something is hard; or at least inconvenient. Dead kids are a sad thing to think about. We can’t just say ‘This is sad. Bad things happen in the world. We can try to make them not happen, but we must keep moving.’ We have to go to extremes to make it seem like they never happened, and/or we must build a memorial to make sure everyone remembers. Repairing damage and putting up a plaque is enough; but we’re afraid of ghosts.
I don’t like this part of our culture. JFK has been dead for 50 years, and yet every year we’re treated to remembrances and maudlin programming. The 2001 attacks were a dozen years ago, but we have to be reminded every year. It’s not that I don’t care; I do. But I am perfectly capable of remembering history on my own, and I don’t need people telling me how I must feel. It’s OK to remember tragedies. It’s silly and wasteful to raze a school because a tragedy happened there.
Of course you put a price tag on sensitivity. If an employee’s spouse dies, you might give him a couple of weeks off of work to mourn. You wouldn’t give him 10 years off.
If I was in charge of the school system, I would listen to the parents and be open to reasonable accommodations but tearing a perfectly good building to the ground and building a new one on the same spot, especially at a cost of $50 million, isn’t reasonable.
This is an elementary school, right? Most university buildings don’t cost anywhere near that, and the land is already owned, so that is all in building materials and labor. Is there a link somewhere on line to any mock ups of this new palatial school?
But that’s going to be predetermined in most cases. It’s governed by laws and union agreements. This isn’t. So the appropriate thing to do is look at some options and choose one based on all the criteria (yes, including cost)- not say “whoa, I’m sympathetic, but not that sympathetic!”
Thanks to the Bush administration it seems to me that this is mostly nonsense. Nothing personal, and I don’t object to the cleaning up and going on as things are. You don’t have to tear everything down and start over. But the whole “we have to guess their intentions and do the opposite of what we think they want!” process is ludicrous. And this wasn’t a terrorist attack anyway. It was a random psychotic assault on small children, so there’s no ideological point to make and there’s not much to be gained by making preteens go back to a building where a few dozens of their classmates were killed.
This is another disturbing fact. Wow, Connecticut must have no other problems, if they can afford to spend $50MM to make some parents feel a little better.