feature image photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images
We thought, naively in retrospect, that things might change after Sandy Hook — that the literal mass murder of small children might impact even the coldest, most NRA-lined heart in Washington. We were wrong. Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, little has been done to prevent the reality so many teachers, students and parents have been forced to accept about the kind of violence and bloodshed this country is willing to tolerate in our schools in the name of our white supremacy-rooted “second amendment rights.”
Merely ten days after the horrific mass shooting of 10 Black residents of Buffalo by a white supremacist in a grocery store — what was then the deadliest shooting of the year so far — another mass shooting took place in Uvalde, Texas, a close-knit community of 15,000. It was every parent, student and teacher’s nightmare: a gunman, armed with an assault weapon, his pathway of destruction uninterrupted by the armed officers outside the school, entered a fourth-grade classroom and killed 19 children between the ages of 9 and 11 and two teachers. An hour elapsed between him entering the school and his eventual execution by a tactical team, during which time cops waited outside, doing nothing. This has not stopped Republican lawmakers insisting more school “security,” rather than gun control measures, is what will stop future tragedies from occurring.
In the aftermath of this horror, we wanted to hold space here on our little gay website for the feelings so many parents and educators have been feeling. What are we stuck on? What actions are we planning? How have we talked to our kids about this and how has that conversation changed over the course of our children’s lifetime? What can we do — to feel better or even just cope, to help, to escape — in the face of the compounded hell we’re trying to move through? We invite you to share your answers to these questions — these are ours.
– Riese & Laneia
Comments
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Thank you all for writing this.
Thank you all. <3
Thank you all so much for sharing all of your anger and hurt. I’m thinking about all of the parents, caretakers, teachers, and kids in my life right now.
Thank you all for what you’ve shared here 💔
Thank you all for writing this, each and every one of you. I’m not a parent. But I was 14 when Sandy Hook happened and 17 when the Charleston church shooting happened, and those two are what made me realize that we just…gave up.
Not because they were more tragic than any other shooting (how do you measure, grief, tragedy, destruction pound for pound?) but because I thought – if there was going to be a straw that broke the camel’s back, they had to be it, right?
Because Sandy Hook happened and it was little children that were dead (and fuck, it feels so callous to reduce it to this but I know this country and who it pretends to care about – it was little White children). And then Charleston happened and it was a church. A Christian church and little White kids – the 2 things that this country swears up and down are precious, worth defending, innocent above all else.
If there was the willpower to change things – if we were all really as fed up as we said we were, if we were all ready to say enough was enough – then this would have to be the turning point, wouldn’t it?
If we didn’t change then, we never would; if this wasn’t bad enough, then nothing ever would be. And now here we are and the cynicism of 17-year-old me has been proven right again and again. And the only reason my peers and I aren’t called the Parkland Generation anymore is because of the goddamn pandemic.
I was also 14 when Sandy Hook happened and remember having a distinct sense of déjà vu when I walked into my grandma’s kitchen the following morning and saw the newspaper sitting on the table. I’m fairly certain I had never heard of Virginia Tech or Columbine at that point, but some part of me just knew that this was how things were going to be from there on out. And to watch all these people on TV talk and talk and talk and then do nothing? It feels all but impossible not to be profoundly cynical about this.
Thank you.
This is not the only reason but it is one of the reasons why I decided to quit teaching after this school year. For the last month I have been seconds away from a panic attack every time I set foot on my campus, and today was the last day. I’m just so sad. And relieved.
oh monique 💛
I’m a teacher and a parent. My building had an intruder drill at 9:30am pacific time on Tuesday, almost the exact moments of the shootings in Texas. It’s all so surreal.
I teach ten year olds and always wonder, “Which of these kids will be taken by these systems? Which ones will perpetuate them?” The shooter was a ten-year-old kid once, as were all of the lobbyists and NRA leaders and government officials I’ve given up on.
What happened? Did their teachers know what they would grow up and be capable of?
And I ask the same questions of my own kiddo. What will their future look like? What can I do as a parent, a teacher, a neighbor, to disrupt the patterns of violence these kids grow up into?
“Which of these kids will be taken by these systems? Which ones will perpetuate them?”
exactly this. it’s almost too much to sit with.
It haunts me.
Thank you for this.
Something I haven’t seen in most of these conversations, including this one, is reflection on millennial and Gen Z parents’ and teachers’ experiences as children and how that relates to being caretakers of children today. I’m older than most of the contributors in this article, and I remember the beginning of active shooter drills in schools as a student. I’m not a parent, and maybe the feelings of parenthood are so strong they utterly overwhelm the memories of what it was like when you were a child, or maybe I had a different experience living in a city where there was a school shooting while I was a child so it was more extreme. But I wonder how parents’ own recollections can help understand what children are going through and need right now.
It’s depressing and rage-inducing to know that we’re on the second full generation of school shootings and still nothing has changed. Some Columbine survivors and their contemporaries have kids who are the age they were in 1999. Our parents were more interested in banning music and video games than gun control or investing in individualized support for teens in school, and over two decades later, this is still happening.
It was bomb threats that were the big thing when I was in high school. We got evacuated more than once because of a bomb threat. And I remember after Columbine we had active shooter protocols and they put paper over the doors in all the classroom doors. I’ve never reflected on how it must have been for my parents, who were both teachers in another district, and I wonder what they thought about it all. I’m definitely going to ask them the next time we talk…
i remember the bomb threats! we evacuated for one of those in elementary school. and then in high school, the year after columbine happened, there was a lot of fear after some sort of threat circulated and so there was one day where almost no students came to school, and the atmosphere was so tense (one of the kids who did come wore a homemade target on his t-shirt) that we called our parents and got permission to ditch. there weren’t drills, though, so I didn’t experience those until I began working as a receptionist at a high school in my twenties, and had to take kids down into the basement and lock them in with me.
Thank you all for sharing the emotions being processed by all of you right now. Thank you for what you all do as parents and educators. I’m sorry about all the pain right now. The human heart is not conditioned to take this constant grief.
thank you all for sharing. it is a hard goddamn time to care about a child or an educator, or to be a child or an educator
Thank you all for giving this space.
As a queer educator, who has now spent the majority of a 4-year career in pandemic teaching mode…this one hit pretty f—ing hard. Is it because it’s tendays after 10 black elders were taken? Is it because we’re barely surviving a *pandemic*, where the same gun-toting “””pro-lifers””” claimed kids *NEEDED* to go back to school for “mental health reasons”…and yet this is what they must still endure? Is it because the number of children lost is the *exact* same number as the students I have? Is it because it’s been months of violence and attacks and vitriol on educators and queer folks…just to literally have a teacher be the last line of defense between babies and a man with a gun.
I don’t know if it’s one or all of them.
I love the space I get to work in. But the hits just keep coming.
I always wonder if my town, my school, my classroom will be next.
We’re tired. We’ve gone through everything of the last two years — at least — with no help, and often criticism of being ‘selfish’ when we ask for what we deserve. And then stuff like this still happens.
We are so, so tired.
I really appreciated these. KaeLyn’s was especially reassuring in a “everything is deeply fucked up” kind of way, because my kid is a similar age, and we also usually talk about stuff like this, but apparently mass shootings are my line. If they end up hearing about this one or the one in Buffalo last week then we’ll talk about it, but, as KaeLyn said, there’s no honest way to frame it as them being safe. They were already freaked out by their first experience with school safety drills earlier this year. It’s all just too much. This is also maybe the first time where my reaction has been to withdraw, staying off social media and not reading any articles about either shooting.
I’m starting a new job in the fall where I’ll be teaching undergrads who are studying to be teachers, and this is making me think as well about how to create/hold spaces for them to process stuff like this, on top of all of the many things making an already challenging job unnecessarily harder in the current political climate.
One strategy I use with my own students that I learned from my science education professor is a KWL chart —
what do we KNOW?
What do we WANT to know? What have we LEARNED from each other in this conversation?
It’s a simple format that provides a helpful structure for talking about traumatic world events. I can fact check what kids have heard, gauge what they are most concerned about, and always frame the wisdom within our own classroom.
Reading this was too much. I stopped in the middle and will read more later. Thank you.
We can’t allow ourselves to give up. What if our queer ancestors had given up? There is progress in gun control on the state level. States with strong gun laws have less gun deaths. We can fight this. If Congress is unsurmountable, focus on the state level. Go to everytown.org to get started.
When we are hopeless about gun control, gun advocates win.
I say this as a scared, sad mother and teacher. We have to keep fighting.
Thank you all.