In the wake of a suicide close to our campus, I began to wonder: as a student body, why don't we talk about the hard stuff?
People like to pretend that stuff like suicide and abuse and sexual assault don't happen at a place like Lee. Because we truly want to believe the best in one another. I hear it all the time. "Lee has the best students around!" From teachers to peers to parents and even outsiders, it's widely agreed that there's just something different about the atmosphere here. Maybe it's the breath of air from our very own backyard mountains, or maybe it's just the ideals set before us or how the majority of students were raised, but there's no doubt that Lee students are special.
But that doesn't make us exempt from heartache and tragedy.
Last Saturday, for example, a student was robbed at gunpoint on campus. Cars get broken into all the time. And last week, a student took his own life.
The world is a broken place. We are susceptible to the worst of tragedies just as much as anyone else. And yet we turn our heads. We walk away. We hear the word "suicide" or "rape," and we can't even bring ourselves to talk about it.
Because, if we talked about it, if we realized the constant danger we're in, we would become immobile. As humans, that's not how we live. We hear about all the bad, and in order to survive, we suppress the possibilities that, yes, that could be us.
But as a place like Lee, it's even more of an injustice to not talk about this stuff. To not publicly acknowledge that one of our students is now gone. To try and cover up the fact that someone has been hospitalized. To force the girl who got pregnant out of school, but to let the guy walk around without any consequences.
I love Lee, but I think at times we're so afraid of scandal or having the Christian school image broken that we think it's easier to just stay silent.
But silence is the opposite of what we need. Silence is the bullet in the gun, the doubts that swirl into the heads of the lonely and the tired. Silence is the trigger, the affirmation that we're on our own; it's the void that the broken and the injured are encased in.
We can't ignore the pain of our students. We can't make excuses that we're trying to protect our students by not releasing information about things that would "frowned upon" by society.
We must speak hardship and pain and doubt so that others can speak life back into us.
We can take this recent suicide on campus and we can either acknowledge it and move on with our lives, or we can use it for good. Tragedy and pain do not have to be meaningless and shouldn't be covered up.
Because silence is never the answer.
