News from Uvalde
We experience the news in flashing screens following us throughout the day. We experience tragedies in news notifications that interrupt our workday.
I was finishing my day at work when the news began to come in. I stayed an extra ten minutes looking at my phone.
I was at the gym lifting weights helplessly while the news explains the circumstances in my earbuds. At the time it was fourteen dead. Now it looks like eighteen. Eighteen dead.
Eighteen is the age of the armed gunman who entered a Texan elementary school and murdered children. My initial reaction was “oh God, another.” Because it was another. Last week there was one in a superstore. There’s no manifesto this time.
Maybe it’s the proximity. Maybe it’s that there were two large shootings so close together that hit me so hard this time. Maybe it was the age of the victims.
And on the news behind the reporter the authorities tell parents that their children are irretrievably gone.
Is there anything left to say? We’ve said it all. Gun control mental health irrelevant comments about immigration law enforcement secondary gun markets imperial violence abroad comes home a culture of individualism isolation manifestos online forums violent television hatred in this country etc etc—we can have the conversation in our head because we’ve had it a thousand times and still nothing changes and we are still a country with a boiling violence lingering under the surface at all times at an arm’s length from an arsenal available to give notoriety to the individuals who boil over. It’s some fundamental brokenness, some rot, some cult to Moloch at the core of our nation, and all we have in response is grief and anger.
What line must we cross before we call this social turmoil? What is the line between isolated incidents and a chapter in a history book like The Troubles or the Years of Lead. When is it a crisis?
And how does this hum behind our everyday life, delivered to us on flashing screens? How do we categorize this crisis when it becomes white noise? We continue to treat these shootings as isolated incidents of bad actors—a result of bad policy, answerable by gun control and better access to mental health. And yes, I believe those policies would aid in the crisis, but I sense the rot goes deeper. Perhaps it’s an emotional reaction and my general pessimistic impulse to believe that the world is ending, but something seems to be cracking and stagnating and dying in this country, and the lack of gun control and psychological help has allowed this brokenness to take such a wicked and violent expression.
And the news—I think it was MSNBC—tells me that the experts expect this to get worse. They blame COVID and the “hard times this country is facing.” They say there will be more. They say this will be the tip of the iceberg.
And I listen to this glib prediction while lifting weights and going about my everyday life. We all do. When do we call it a crisis? How loud do the thoughts and prayers have to be before it deserves a chapter in a history book?
Is this what a dying country looks like? Or only a rotten one? Perhaps we’ll find an answer on flashing screens in the coming years.
EDIT: the death toll has now risen to at least 23.