Processing in the wake of Uvalde
Content note: This piece is about some of my personal reactions to the mass shooting that took place at an elementary school yesterday in Uvalde, TX. Please skip this post if you are not in a good place to see this content.
As everyone is by now all too aware, yesterday a mass shooter murdered at least 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX. News is still emerging about the victims, 19 of whom are young children.
As the news was breaking yesterday, I was somehow in a little bubble for a while. I was working, I had a dentist appointment, and I went to go vote in the primary run off elections. When I logged into my agency’s board meeting on Zoom at 5:30, I had not heard what had happened about 6 hours before. The board chair, an extremely skilled social worker and educator, opened space for us to acknowledge what had unfolded and I frantically Googled on my phone so I could try to understand what was being discussed.
Immediately, my blood ran cold—not only because another horrific mass shooting had taken place in this country (the 213th one this year, and the worst ever in Texas history) but extra cold because I began to understand that the target of this massacre was elementary aged children, specifically those in grades 2-4.
My brain, flooded by all of the worst emotions one can have, desperately grasped all yesterday evening for some way to process this event. Of course, in the face of such heinous violence, there is no way to process it…there is no making sense of it. The emotions I settled into last night were fully sorrow and rage—the rage especially pointed at Texas state leadership who has so greatly failed us, in more ways than I can even adequately articulate; leadership who is planning to talk at an NRA convention in just a couple of days in Houston; leadership who has outlawed abortion, is attempting to criminalize gender affirming care for youth, and who support White Supremacist policies, but puts almost no restrictions on guns at all.
The rage and sorrow stayed with me the rest of the day. By the evening, the weather outside changed drastically. A bad storm came in and it started with wind so intense that I commented to my partner that I felt like our windows could shatter or a tree may fall over (thankfully neither occurred.) By the time I was trying to fall asleep, I told myself a little story about how it felt like Mother Nature was mourning with us all—her large display of grief and rage sounded and felt outside like mine felt inside.
When I woke up this morning, I felt sort of like a hollow shell…just empty from the weight of too much sorrow, is a way I suppose I could put it. As I went about my morning routine, I had assumed that my daily outdoor walk would be moved to my treadmill, as that’s my backup plan for when it’s gross outside. But as I opened my blinds and took a peek out, the sun was shining. In fact, it wasn’t just nice and sunny…it was actually the most beautiful morning I have beheld in weeks if not months. It’s already been brutally hot here since early April, so today’s walk in 66 degrees, gorgeous sun, with a vigorous cooling breeze meant that it was like I woke up to the most glorious and incredible world…as if Mother Nature had splashed some cool water on her face, got her shit together, after that display of rage.
But as I took my walk, the juxtaposition of the beauty around me next to the emptiness remaining inside me bubbled up in a very specific way. I found tears streaming down my cheeks. It felt immeasurably cruel and incomprehensible that the world could have the audacity to show up so gorgeously around me when families just a couple hours drive away from me are experiencing the worst 24 hours of their entire lives. It felt unshakably upsetting to think how the weather felt like a metaphor for how quickly news and national attention will inevitably turn their backs on these people, just as we have for the survivors of Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Virginia Tech, and so many others. To hold the awareness that it’s been 20 years since Columbine and 10 since Sandy Hook and absolutely nothing has changed except for the worse, should sicken any human with half a conscious.
I won’t pretend that I really know how to solve or address any of this, but I can say with certainty that the current track record of “do nothing” isn’t working. The proliferation of gun violence could hardly have one easy, obvious solution…it’s pretty clearly a complicated situation that results from societal failures at every level. We would be ridiculous to not acknowledge that this is a unique problem in the United States, clearly connected to the presence of JUST SO VERY MANY guns. It’s beyond obvious that these things don’t happen in countries with more restrictions. Our increasingly warped relationship to the second amendment, written in a time when automatic/assault rifles didn’t even exist, is one of the sicknesses strangling our ability to have a peaceful public life. Gun violence is an obvious public health crisis here and there are overlapping concerns with the lack of access to mental health services.
And one last point that stands out as quite obvious to me is the continued gendered nature of this violence. Mass shooters are overwhelmingly male, and their violence extremely frequently starts with domestic violence against the women in their families before it turns outward toward other students or people. It sounds like this time, it was the grandmother of the killer who was the first murdered.
It’s far past time to change how we treat boys…we must stop seeing them from the moment they are born as tougher or rougher than their sisters. Our very lives depend on teaching boys to view and experience their emotions across the whole spectrum in healthy ways. We desperately must allow our boys to be soft and vulnerable, without negative reaction, but rather encouragement of their softness. We must welcome them into expressing more than just anger. We desperately must teach them that one of the bravest things you can do is bring a voice to your darkest inside feelings so that you can get help. We desperately must show them that masculinity and asking for help are not in opposition, but rather that the kind of masculinity we NEED is one of community, connection, joy, and mutual support. I used to be the kind of feminist to joke about “drinking male tears” when they got upset about something I said online, and let me tell you, I couldn’t feel more wrong about that…not because I care about protecting trolls’ feelings, but because I was playing a role in the portrayal of male crying as worth mockery, no matter how small.
Well, as I said at the start, I wrote about this today to process. But of course there is no amount of processing that will ever make a difference in trying to make sense of what is truly senseless. I’m left with as much sorrow and empty hollow ache as before. I guess all I can do for now is just love the people hurting around me a little more.