I just read an article in today's Washington Post seriously exploring whether children should have cell phones in school, and how they MIGHT be dangerous (one expert said even vibrations could give a kid's location away to a shooter), as well as all the traditional worries about the cesspool of the Internet.
Another section of the site was reporting on how one child in Uvalde dialed 911 on the phone of his murdered teacher. Of course, no one jumped to his rescue, as it turns out, but at least the child could connect to a human being as a madman raged nearby.
This sort of reporting is defensible since every angle of the horrible massacre deserves to be explored, and those 911 calls that continued for over an hour following the murderer's invasion of a fourth-grade classroom continue to be (maybe?) the most frustrating and horrifying image Americans now have of that terrible day.
It's all a distraction from what a reasonable person would label as the key problem: so many guns. The media, to its shame, can't keep its focus on the problem and neither can politicians, parents, educators, or anyone else.
Let's talk phones and doors... anything to get our minds off the slaughter of innocents.
I saw a provocative post on social media yesterday that boiled down to a parable about a school that experienced an attack by a guy with a hammer. The response from those in command? Give every kid a hammer, thus solving the problem. I didn't do the parable justice, but you get the idea.
When it comes to Republicans and their false idol of guns, you just cant' fix stupid. I know we are not supposed to vilify our neighbors and relatives and fellow citizens, calling them evil or stupid or dupes... but at some point reality must be recognized.
A columnist likened America's willingness to see thousands of gun deaths each month as a fair exchange for mythical Second Amendment rights to the nation practicing human sacrifice.
In many historical instances, human sacrifice made a bargain with the gods: we will give you this ONE individual so that the many can prosper, or the rains will come, or the war will be won. The minority of gun worshippers in the U.S. have made a similar calculation, subbing in "freedom" for prosperity, rain, and victory.
Worship of the gun overwhelms most of the good will and kindness that most humans share. Just as the anti-abortion fanatics fixate on one issue, we have Americans who combine two fixations: anti-abortion and the right to guns. The fact that those two positions seem logically opposed to one another, with the first advocating for births over all other factors and the latter position OK with death-dealing weapons in everyone's hands, makes no impact on the radical right.
Many radical Americans dislike teachers while simultaneously seeming to trust them with guns in the schools. They don't trust any authorities beyond the false prophets who spew hate and fear online and on cable. I see that nearly 25 percent of Americans over 65 either have not been vaccinated or have only had one shot... and they die at rates many times higher than other age groups.
Those deaths are not suicides, technically, but all those needless deaths seem like the result of a choice.
Some percentage of those vaccine refusers over 65 will proclaim that God will protect them, or that their fate is in his hands. This is religion at its worst, and the logic leads to (somehow) God being willing to allow children to be horribly mutilated by high-speed bullets... so who are we to interfere?
Nothing can be done to stem the number of shootings. Nothing can be done to save the lives of the elderly. Except in most other countries on the planet.
So it goes.
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