May 24, 2022
Dear LREI Families,
For the second time in 10 days I am writing to you about a mass shooting. For the second time in 10 days a young person, barely out of childhood, an adolescent, has committed murder. And this time, the murdered, the lights lost, were children, eighteen of them. The nineteenth to die today? Their teacher.
What drove this person to commit this act? Racism? Hatred? Bigotry? What warning signs did the collective “we” miss that could have averted these 20 deaths? Did a life mingling with haters online propel these actions as has happened so many times before? We will learn more, but I will go out on a limb and assume we have heard the story before and, alas, likely will again.
And the guns. So many guns. The tools that give racism and bigotry the power they don’t deserve. That allow someone to arrive in a community and to bind their hatred with the finality of a firearm and to change the community, to change so many lives, forever. There are more guns in America than people. We as a nation have so little appetite for addressing this problem. We can bring outrage to a discussion of how our children identify, to the suggestion that we provide healthcare to all, and to the idea that it should be easy to vote. Yet, where is the same outrage regarding the epidemic of gun deaths or the fact that we teach our children how to run and hide from gunmen in schools while not allowing them to talk about love between two people? I hope history forgives us for not prioritizing the lives of the innocent.
So, as others will, I bring my hopes and condolences and offer them to the families of Uvalde and Buffalo and Laguna Woods, but I am going to work hard to bring my outrage as well. I will bring it to the voting booth and to my computer keyboard. I want to hear the righteous indignation of my elected officials and I want to see bill after bill put forth on the floor of the House and the Senate and wherever else one can put bills and I want my elected officials to be as tired of having their bills voted down as I am of writing these letters and as you are of receiving them.
All of that said, tonight I am thinking of the families in Uvalde and I am thinking of our family, and of your families. Tomorrow, in school, we will be thinking of your children– caring for them and listening and doing our best to respond when they ask, “How on Earth can this happen, again?”
Our mental health team shares these resources:
Please be in touch. Please hug your kids.
Peace,
