I love the fourth graders. They are deep thinkers who are uninterested in the pre-teen/tween dramas that await them. They are into bugs and getting dirty in the garden and spraying one another with the hose and none of them should be worrying about being shot to pieces, bodies so destroyed that it took DNA evidence to identify their corpses.
Gabby Giffords is doing great work on the state and local levels, but Steve Kerr says it best.
Steve Kerr just walked out of a pre-game interview after laying the blame squarely on Republican Senators and Joe Manchin - 50 people blocking the will of nearly 90% of the American people.
Bill Penzey has been including the Republicans are not good people mantra in his weekly emails for years now.
Do we really have to live like this?
How brave does a parent have to be to drop her child off at school in the morning?
The kindergarteners when I was shot will be seniors in high school when classes resume in August. They have learned to hide silently in closets during Active Shooter Drills. They have watched little kids and big kids and medium size kids killed with weaponry they were too small to pick up when we first met in 2011.
Ben's Bells went to Newtown, and soothed souls. The Parkland kids became vocal activists for gun safety legislation. I've spent all day trying to find my place in all this, smiling at the friends far and wide who reached out to be sure that I was okay, reassuring them that I was, when the reality is that I just don't know.
CTG would have attained her majority this year (she'd have liked that phrase, asked me to delve deeper into it, considered it, and then made it her own..... I miss her.....). The Sandy Hook Elementary kids would be thinking about prom and PSAT's. The 4th graders at Robb Elementary School..... the educators who huddled with them and died with them..... sending thoughts and prayers and condolences and blankets and casseroles can't make up for the fact that they'll never be 5th graders.
We really shouldn't have to live like this.
There are things we could do but pernicious polarization has us again and again doing nothing. Block all 18 year olds from buying guns has happened in 6 states. Why not all as they do most of this. Then better background checks that go back to schools and what they find-- something that would help but isn't done for various excuses. I imagined this would be really terrible for you as it was for most of us. The hate in this country though is yet another problem that we need to figure out why someone shoots a stranger waiting for a subway :( Heartbreaking again and again.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much hate. It used to be subterranean, but the media and Trump and Facebook and Twitter Jane turned over that rock and allowed then to find comfort with others.
DeleteI miss the melting pot stories we learned in 4th grade.
Your solutions are spot on. Too bad power trumps reason in the Senate.
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I packed my bag of tricks with one last book and stacks of certificates and went to Columbia on Wednesday to read and hug first graders. Today, Thursday, I will go again and love on the second graders. It's the best I can do.
ReplyDeleteAnd you are doing something! Making your little corner of the world a better place.... because the grown ups everywhere else aren't doing much to help, are they?
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For those who are harping on about how this is an act of one evil and deranged individual, I have to say "Your reductive statement is just not enough." I know nothing about the perpetrator. He may have been evil and deranged but he was certainly not alone in responsibility for the violence rampant in this country. High time for some big changes.
ReplyDeleteMental Health is certainly an issue, but without legislation and information sharing the crazies among us can legally buy weapons , as those of us here in Tucson know quite well.
DeleteYes he was deranged. But a knife or a baseball bat would not have caused that much damage.
High time, indeed.
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