September 11, a letter from Mr. Shaulis
September 11th
If you have the 2002 edition of The Peak, Lake Ridge Academy’s yearbook, take it out this weekend and open it to page 2. Dominating the page is a large photograph of Upper School faculty and students taken during the morning of September 11, 2001. The photo shows us gathered in the newly renovated Upper School Commons watching the horrors as they unfolded on the television screen. No caption is needed as the faces tell the story of our shock, pain, worry and sadness.
Later that year, Meredith Swayngim wrote in the Senior Farewell edition of the school paper that her most memorable moment at Lake Ridge was 9/11 because of the way Mr. Michael, who was the Director of the Upper School, and the Upper School teachers handled the day and comforted the students. It helped her and all of the students deal with the pain. She went on to write that from that day on, she really felt that “Lake Ridge was a community.”
I know how she felt because as I stood in the Commons with my colleagues and students watching the television, I, too, drew comfort from being in this place with these people. As tragic as the events of that September 11th were, in some ways that day marked the beginning of the Upper School that we were to become as a new sense of community emerged as well as new traditions as a result of the attacks.
One of these traditions is Diversity Forum. Organized by Dr. Mozumdar, Diversity Forum was a reaction to the acute sense of alienation that our Middle Eastern and South Asian students were experiencing, best expressed by senior Omar Al-Jadda’s words to Dr. Mozumdar, “I didn’t do it.” These Lake Ridge students began to feel that they were different and that perhaps even their fellow classmates viewed them as being different, as a fearful American public made a person’s ethnicity a reason for suspicion.
Our first Diversity Forum, held in the fall of 2001, brought together a number of students from the surrounding area who met with a panel of Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim religious leaders as they discussed the commonality of all religious philosophies. Growing in size and scope over the years, Diversity Forum has since become one of the pillars of the Upper School as each year we continue to educate our students on the various issues of diversity.
This Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. We will remember those whose lives were lost, the sacrifices of first responders at Ground Zero, and the heroic efforts of a group of passengers whose plane flew briefly over our own Northern Ohio skies. Let us also remember how many of us came together as a community on that day, how we comforted each other, and how we sought to educate ourselves in a time of tragedy to find common ground, understanding, and hope for a better world.
Let us also heed the advice given to us by T.H. White in The Once and Future King on the value of education in times of distress as Merlyn says to Wart:
“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your lonely love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”
M. Shaulis
Director of Upper School