Katie’s Musings: Thoughts and Prayers Feb 16, 2018 | News Another day, another school shooting. That sounds callous. I don’t mean it to be. Apologies. It’s just that there have been eight shootings at US schools that have resulted in injury or death in 2018. And it’s February. For the record. Facebook becomes a strange place after gun violence occurs (which I know because it occurs so often). I have a wide range of friends on facebook, so my scroll through the day’s life stories tends to be like a strange, disjointed run-on sentence train of thought… “Such a tragedy. Thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families.” “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE NOT ENOUGH.” “Universal background checks and sensible laws to regulate gun ownership!” “But bad guys who want guns will always be able to get guns.” “ARM THE TEACHERS! MORE ACTIVE SHOOTING DRILLS!” “Active shooting drills clearly do not work. Oh, and SURE the answer to getting guns out of schools is to PUT MORE GUNS IN SCHOOLS! Idiot…” “The REAL problem is the way we deal with mental illness…” etc. etc. etc. Voices screaming in the wilderness, desperate to be heard, to be right, to argue with the iVoid, anything, absolutely ANYTHING to avoid the pain of children being dead and the fact that it is maybe possibly potentially our collective damn fault… Our unwillingness to have a conversation with those with whom we vehemently disagree… Our unwillingness to do the work towards dismantling the violent patriarchal and racial structures that our country has thrived on for so long… Our unwillingness to value humanity over violence… peace over profit… Our unwillingness to choose the difficult, brazen, human-loving, compassionate, liberating path of Jesus, favoring instead the comfort and convenience of a patriotic alibi-Gospel. But I digress. This all goes on for a week or so. And then we forget. Until the next time when it starts up again. And nothing is done. Nothing is changed. We look into the eyes of our children and tell them we are sorry and you matter, but then whisper the rest to ourselves… only as far as the bottom line. We promise to never forget names and faces, but we do. We promise our thoughts and prayers…. but then again, somewhere along the line, “thoughts and prayers” became a secret code for “complete and total inaction.” We condemn the shooter and throw around words like “troubled youth” and “mentally ill” and “violence at home” and avoid the unavoidable fact that this rhetoric changes drastically from case to case directly in correlation with the race of the shooter. We celebrate the teachers who knowingly and willingly place their lives on the line every day they go to school now (while we devalue them every other day of the week, for the record) and decide it’s easier not to then question the systems that make it necessary for them to make that choice. We quantify the lives of living, breathing humans in this world and decide 17 this time around is not quite enough to go about the messy business of dealing with our own shame, our own propensity towards violence, the pioneer culture and heritage that has shaped this nation in, sure, a number of positive ways but in powerfully violent and destructive ones as well. We stop caring. We dehumanize. We disassociate. We think and we pray, anything to remain immobile and comfortable. ……. …….I’m now trying to find a way to wrap this blog post up in a positive, hopeful light. I’ve got nothing. Kids and teachers are dead, and I’m sad and angry and annoyed and tired. Like a lot of the other, people, I guess. But hey, guess what, folks? It’s LENT. It’s a time literally created for reflection, for hardship, for discomfort, a time to remind us who we are, where we come from, what we value, to whom we belong and to whom we shall return and what we should do in the process. It’s the perfect time to take a good hard look at that which makes us comfortable and turn it upside down and question and shake it up and see what comes out on the other side. AKA: the perfect time to take those “thoughts and prayers” and figure out a way to turn them into “movement and action.” That. Let’s do that. Because we kind of have to.
