What is There to Say

CONTENT WARNING: This post deals with the horrific events this week in Texas and Buffalo. It’s raw and does contain significant imagery that I imagine others will also find disturbing; I certainly do. Even if you are a fan of this blog, please, everyone, feel free to *not* continue to read this.

I didn’t think I’d be writing that night. I’d had a migraine, bad enough that I had to leave work before I was unable to drive. I was feeling better, if a little off from the medicine, when I happened to check the news section on Facebook after getting home from picking Lucy up. 

Fourteen kids, one teacher, at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. That number would only increase until nineteen children and two teachers were known to lay dead in a classroom. 

Last week, it was eleven people, grocery shopping, Buffalo, NY; because by a shooter who hated black people. Then four more, church parishioners in Laguna Woods, California, because by a shooter who hated Taiwanese people. Hatred or not, I cannot fathom that violent of a response.

Who could hate young kids so much? 

I have a memory of talking to Clark (on one of his good days) and Hawthorne; Clark had made this point before, I knew. He was talking about terrorism, you know, your general light dinner table discussion. He said that the enemy would never win with the large scale attacks like 9/11; America was more unified than ever on 9/12/2001, after all. No, he said, it would be small attacks; “soft targets,” he called them. Supermarkets and movie theaters, malls and sporting events. And this was back in 2011. He was saying this before Sandy Hook, before the Boston Marathon, before Charlestown and West Webster and El Paso and Las Vegas and Orlando and the rest of the mind- and heart-numbing list. Attacking innocent people here, there, who were just going about their daily lives would sow fear into the social fabric of America. Not for the first time, today those sentiments haunt me. 

I wonder if he would be surprised at how many more mass shootings there have been since he died. Or how little has been done to prevent them. Or how Americans have responded to the pandemic. Probably not, I figure; he had his health problems, but never was afflicted by optimism much.

Clark didn’t live to feel Oscar kick, or see Hawthorne discover and settle into themself, or hear Lucy’s ridiculous giggle. He missed those joys. Yet I find myself grateful that, as with my own parents, he also missed the entire Trump presidency, the pandemic, and the death of his firstborn. He didn’t have to know that pain. 

Hawthorne had been so immediately and deeply affected by the death of RBG, mere hours before their own. It broke my heart that we spent our last night together with that tension between us. Three and a half months later, I was grateful that they did not know of the attack on the Capitol; they would have been terrified. They already lived with so much fear – of violence, of death, of losing their rights. We used to laugh about their “prepper” ways, the supply of canned goods and campstoves, the tote filled with space blankets and lighters, gallons of potable and non-potable water and container of bleach, “8 drops/gal” scribbled on the white bottle. They weren’t jokes so much as a dark-humor attempt to bring levity to Hawthorne’s real, deep-seated fear that we would one day have to suddenly fend for ourselves.

It was this mentality that had Hawthorne demanding that, if we were to have a gun in the house, I needed to know how to use it. Clark had recommended a particular rifle, and that’s what Hawthorne wanted. A couple days after filling out the paperwork, we stood in the yard of the local instructor. I cried as I loaded, racked, and shot twice. I hated the cold, heavy feel in my hands, weighing on my heart. It didn’t matter that I had managed to hit the broad side of the hill that served as the target. My soul hurt worse than my shoulder as I left Hawthorne and the instructor to their apparent enjoyment of handling this weapon. I told Hawthorne on the way home that, even knowing how to use it as intended, I was far more likely to swing to hit someone with it. I didn’t think I could ever pull that trigger.

I do not understand the appeal of guns, for any reason – for hunting or sport or protection. I have seen firsthand the damage they do to the human body; I’ve staunched the blood and bandaged the wounds on the living, and closed the glassy eyes of the dead. The headlines in Uvalde, the closeness of the community where I lived for seven years in Buffalo; all the details I try to avoid haunt me. They needed DNA samples to identify some of the children. I’ve seen the wreckage bullets leave in the flesh of grown men; I can’t stop thinking about what they would do to a child. I look at my own child, and she does not understand why I am silently weeping, but pats the tears on my face anyway. My two-and-a-half year old tells me, “Mama, it’s okay, it’s okay, Mama, good Mama.” She’s far too young to understand that some things won’t ever be OK.

I don’t want to send her to school in a few years. I barely want to send her to daycare now. It’s not like I feel like she’s any safer with me, these days; I definitely thought twice about grocery shopping this week. How quickly could I get out? Where are the other exits? Maybe I should just do Instacart. Is that putting someone else in danger, someone else’s kid or parent that could be taken away? Am I willing to put my life on the line to assuage this theoretical guilt in what should be an impossible scenario? 

Is your belief in the Second Amendment, that you have the right to bear arms and fancy yourself a vital member of a “well regulated militia,” stronger than any other single person’s right to buy their fucking groceries? Sit in a goddamn classroom? If your answer is “but my freedom!” then you go take your hard-earned “IN GOD WE TRUST” freedom and just buy yourself a bigger dick at the local Amazing and wave that around instead. Bet they’ve got bullets, too. 

No disrespect to Brian Bilston, America is not a gun. It is the blood-stained money that passes over glass counters into the hands of men, men who profit in the wakes of innocents, who mumble “thoughts and prayers” like it’s their get-out-of-hell-free card. 

If admitting that I am scared means “the enemy has won,” whichever enemy that happens to be today, so be it. Just stop killing our kids, our families, our elders, our lovers. I, like so many, really believed that things would change after Sandy Hook. And instead of those twenty kids getting ready for junior prom, and those teachers getting ready to wrap up another pandemic school year, they are nearly ten years gone, and we are again in mourning. This time, the rage feels helpless. There is no unity, no banding together of what felt like the whole country the day after the towers fell. I have more faith that once again, the gun rights activists – especially now, in what I wish we could call a post-Trump era – will make sure to line the pockets of enough of those government influencers, the politicians, so that nothing changes; I am more certain of that than I am of my own relative safety while running errands anymore. 

There’s no silver lining; there’s no coming back from this. The incidents in Buffalo and Uvalde blend in my mind until they are nearly indistinguishable in the well of collective grief. This is not the world I want to raise my daughter in. If she chooses to go into battle, I want her to be old enough to make that decision logically, and be aware of the consequences; not when she’s learning what a goddamn preposition is. If she’s going to face death, I want her to have lived more than a scant few years. Instead, I’m going to send her into a brick building that may have a door left unlocked, to be protected by someone who is vastly underpaid and undervalued, and never asked for this shit. I’m not okay with this; but this is the world we live in now, where hope is school child, playing dead among the bodies, still in the line of fire.