The All Too Short Life of Rachael Scott

Last Wednesday, March 14, Darrell Scott, father of Rachael Scott who was killed in the Columbine, CO school shootings, spoke at ONU.  As a father of 3 little girls, I can't imagine losing one of them in this way.

"We must stop violence in our schools", he said.  Truth.  To stop violence, we must stop hatred & ignorance & apathy.  And we must realize that it begins in each of us.  It begins in me.  Cue the Michael Jackson "Man in the Mirror" music.

He spoke a lot about some things his daughter Rachael had written in a diary that they discovered under her bed after she was killed.  In it, she came up with a challenge - to start "a chain reaction of kindness and compassion", which she called her ethics and codes of life.  That is, she thought that by going out of her way to reach out to those around her with kindness, that this would change their hearts & minds, and in turn give them the ability to do the same.  That people would begin to believe in each other again.

The tone of attitudes and conversations that we hear, that surround us, that we bring, has such a tremendous effect on us.  It is as if our culture does much of our thinking for us.  If we're surrounded by ugly, we'll be ugly - unless we try really hard not to be.  And if we're surrounded by kindness, we'll react the same.  Of course, we can all choose our own posture within the tide, to swim with it or against it.  Rachael believed she could change the swimming direction of the whole school of fish by pointing it, one fish at a time, in the right direction.

I like it.  She was a beautiful soul.

It was heart-breaking to hear her Dad speak.  So much tragedy, so much pain in those senseless killings.  And yet, somehow in the half-hour I listened to him, somehow there was hope.  It was an amazing juxtaposition of sorrow and hope.  It reached down to your gut and twisted everything.

A few more gems:
"Give people three chances before judging them.  Don't rely on first, second, our even third impressions."
"Practice 'pre-acceptance' instead of prejudice."
"Look for the best in others."
"Look out for the the Disabled, new at school, picked on our put down by others.  One person can go out of their way to show kindness."
"Use words that heal, not words that hurt."
"Rachael refused to treat a bully with anything but kindness. She saw through the external meanness.  Don't look at a person, see through."