Again.

Photo by Hoach Le Dinh on Unsplash

Sometimes, it’s the sameness that makes it all feel unbearable. When news of the school shooting in Uvalde broke, my first thought was, again?

There is a particular heartbreak in that “again.” A cycle of grief turned groove in our collective psyche. The murder of children on a mass scale and it feels…familiar.

When I was a young reporter, I was assigned the education beat. This was before Columbine. Two names reverberate in my head. Kip Kinkel and Andrew Golden. Two school shooters when the names of perpetrators got more attention than adding another specific school name to a list so long it now also includes cities.

To be clear, it’s not that their identities deserved more attention. It’s just that school shootings were still such outliers we thought understanding the shooters would help prevent future incidents.

We should have spent more energy on reckoning with the culture that makes them. Arms them. Crafts excuses and deploys evasions in advance for enabling them. The same excuses we already hear about the latest violent iteration of our self-loathing.

But we didn’t, immediately making metaphors of Columbine because we weren’t willing to deal with its realities.

When I left journalism, I taught high school for six years in the early 2000s. This meant my school was newly surrounded with Columbine-inspired wrought iron fencing, had “enhanced security protocols,” and a fulltime campus resource officer.

About halfway through my time there, the school went into a full lockdown. A female student said she’d been pulled into a bathroom by a man with a gun. That man would never be apprehended.

What would happen is students and teachers spent the next four hours locked in our rooms, using the “all clear” code word in hourly calls with the office, and trying to catch any news we could in the era of living life before the immediacy of social media.

It was terrifying and tedious. News helicopters circled overhead. Parents gathered by the hundreds at the main gate, trying to find their children. And then, hours later, it was over. Students went home. We showed up the next day and soldiered on.

The only gun I saw during the lockdown was carried by an off-duty police officer in tennis shorts and a polo. He’d come straight from working out and was part of a team clearing the campus building by building.

I saw his gun through my tiny rectangle of a window before I saw him. Then his face. Then his clothes. Nothing about him save a tactical vest said “cop.” My first thought was that the shooter had arrived and it might be my time.

Then he gave me a thumbs up and moved on. My students, who I’d pushed to the back of the room and away from the window, never even saw him. A small mercy. But I can still picture him to this day.

When I left for a graduate degree and a career in higher education, I saw the shift happen in full. My students came to college increasingly fearful. School was a site of potential mass violence. Lockdowns and active shooter drills had rendered them homes to present danger.

I saw it in the short stories and essays they wrote in my classes. I saw it in the safety tips they shared with each other unbidden. I saw it in the gallows humor they buffered the fear with.

At the same time, my own children grew up and went to school. Sandy Hook happened and people lamented. “Never again” was met with idiotic calls for more “good men with guns” and fresh donations to the NRA and politicians who crave power over progress.

Kids learned to deadbolt doors. Use desks as body armor. Carry ballistic-grade backpacks. Throw books at a shooter in a last-ditch effort to survive. Public calls to arm teachers became stupidly common.

There is a particular sense of helplessness in knowing the very training that is ingraining life-long fear in now a second generation of students is also necessary because we are too afraid to make the cultural changes we know we need to.  

There is a particular dread in dropping off our kids or spouses (my wife is a high school English teacher) at a campus that is both generally safe and exactly where senseless violence could occur and all in the same moment.

Talking about the Uvalde shootings, my 15-year-old son said, “It’s crazy. We live in California, so we really need the earthquake and fire drills. But the shooter drills are the thing we’re supposed to care more about.”

Neither he nor my 19-year-old daughter have ever known a world where this is not the norm. My 11-year-old son once said he just chooses not to think about it because it’s too scary. In all of that I feel our collective failure.

Convention says I should end these scattered reflections with a call to action. An elucidation of our moral imperative and shared humanity. An attempt to draw some kind of unified meaning from it all.

But I can’t. We know what we need to do. We lack the will to do it. And so, we sentence ourselves to the horrific sameness we so commonly feel, re-setting the clock as we wait for the next Uvalde.

It does not have to be this way, except it does because we choose to make it so. Our thoughts and prayers and pass me more bullets form of civic religion constructs the tracks of this violent reality and propels a continuous train of grief along them.

I hope we change, but I fear we won’t. We’ve had the entirety of my adult life to do so and it hasn’t happened.

As the old wisdom says, the proof of what we love can be seen in how that love affects others. Our passive acceptance of this kind of violence, then, is pretty damning evidence.