Uvalde

Nineteen children and two adults were shot dead by an armed nutter at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday the 24th of May, 2022. It made the national and even global news. As school shootings go, this one was close to home in a fairly literal sense. The town is about eighty miles west of San Antonio, and was the next town along for my wife when she was growing up in Pearsall. We have friends from Uvalde.

When I heard the news, I didn't know what to think - not beyond the usual thoughts which tend to occur in the wake of an event such as this; and I wouldn't like to presume that my thoughts on the matter are necessarily either informed or interesting. Nevertheless, a couple of days later I find myself ranting about it. One of those relatives is in the car repeating the clichés which usually find their way around to thoughts and prayers - the testimony you would probably expect of someone with nothing better to do than showcase her own emotional range by saying what everyone else has been saying. I find it annoying because the conversational equivalent of a sad face emoticon doesn't really seem to quite cover the death of a bunch of kids, and because we've now had quite a few school shootings and all evidence thus far seems to suggest that thoughts and prayers haven't made any difference whatsoever.

'It's the whole fucking culture,' I say, although the word fucking is only applied for emphasis in my head. I don't say it out loud because she's one of those relatives. After ten years with a stepson serving as my bathysphere, I feel I have accrued a reasonable understanding of at least certain aspects of the American school system. Accordingly I rant with at least some narrative cohesion against toxic masculinity, toxic patriotism, ceremony for the sake of ceremony, and the notion that being a fucking moron is simply a different and yet equally valid form of intelligence - even an achievement under certain circumstances. After twenty or thirty seconds I reign my monologue in because it's spinning out of control and is making me angry; but it has at least done its job in stemming a string of banal observations delivered in the tone of Penelope Pitstop demanding to speak to your supervisor.

The thoughts and prayers irritate me at least as much as the bullshit coming from the other side of the fence, the fucknuggets shitting themselves at the idea that a few dead kids might mean that those liberal stormtroopers we keep hearing about come to take away their precious firearms. Of course, that's also the side making the argument for improved mental healthcare; and I have myself been accused of wrongthink for suggesting there's a psychiatric issue here, because if we've learned anything since the advent of the internet, if someone on the right has said it, then it's obviously bad, you Nazi.

You're worse than Hitler!

Anyway, we drive to Uvalde because it's the weekend and Bess wants to take a look. It occurs to me that we might be no better than morbidly inclined sightseers, but it doesn't occur to me for long because it's a stupid thing to think, facilitated only by the events in Uvalde having been too big and horrible for any sort of coherent thought. It's high school graduation season and one of the towns along the way has lined the main thoroughfare with blown up photographs of all the kids who graduated. It takes about a minute to pass them all. It's an uncomfortable foreshadowing of the photographs we'll soon see pinned to the chain link fence of the school.

I expect Uvalde to be small, but it's probably bigger than Pearsall and seems to have more going on. The phrase thoughts and prayers appears on every other gas station sign, chalked on walls because, I suppose, what else is there? The town square would be idyllic under other circumstances, but today it's filled with news crews and crowds of people just needing to do something with whatever it is they're feeling. I recall seeing our local, or relatively local politician on television. Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, was seemingly addressing a meeting of the National Rifle Association when the shooting occurred. I've seen footage of Beto O'Rourke - approximately one of the good guys, I guess - calling Abbott out at some meeting, probably not the same one, specifically bringing up the issue of gun control. Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, gets all steamed and asks how Beto can be so low as to make this into a political issue.

We park around the corner from the school. There are a lot of people there and the chain link fence is buried beneath an embankment of soft toys, flowers, devotional religious materials and so on; but we can all see the photographs of the nineteen faces.

They all look so happy, so full of life and promise, and they're all dead. This is the end of their collective story, and it will always be the end. Nothing is ever going to make this right or balance it out. I didn't anticipate finding myself so upset over the deaths of people I've never met, and possibly never would have met. I don't shed a tear but I come close. This isn't anything that can be understood.

After a few minutes, we return to the car and drive back through the square. Parked down a side road I notice an expensive RV, seemingly with satellite broadcasting capabilities. Billy Graham Ministries is written upon the side in a luxurious font with rapid response team beneath in smaller letters. I assume it probably works much like International Rescue on Thunderbirds with the team scrambling to the scene of each new atrocity to make it better by having a quick pray, maybe even healing some sins or whatever it is that they actually do.

So it is a mental health issue because shooting someone in response to grandma taking your phone is not the action of a reasonable human being; but disassembling the entire system of which such mental health issues are a natural by-product, then putting it back together in a configuration which doesn't entail a body count isn't going to happen, because a good thing in this country is a thing which generates revenue, and it's only ever that. The right people are getting paid by virtue of the system operating as it does, meaning the system is working just fine, thank you very much.

On the other hand, when an individual with mental health issues, who isn't ever going to get any help with those mental health issues, has access to a gun, that person is going to find it significantly easier to kill another person than would be the case if he or she - but probably he - were to be denied access to a gun.

I know it's difficult to understand.

Within twenty-four hours I hear of someone proposing that it would never have happened if we'd just armed the teachers.

This situation is not going to change.