In America, we simply do not value human life.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - our country is built on genocide. It's built on the persecution and annihilation of American Indians. It's built by the labor of slaves and the industry of mass incarceration. It's build on the subjugation of women, women afraid for their lives and careers, women who, until recently, couldn't speak out about their abuse.
America is built on poverty and on segregation. White Americans take their children out of local schools - instead of investing in our education system and therefore bringing about much needed change, they shield their children from black and brown peers. And those students continue to live in abject poverty, their schools without heat, their bellies without food, their communities ravaged by constant violence. In America we do not value every child, only our own.
America is built on selfishness and consumerism. Nothing is more important to us than our own safety, our own bank accounts, our own place in an economic and racial caste system. We hate taxes, hate the idea of socialized medicine, hate the idea of helping the poorest among us, even as they starve and suffer. And we clamor for guns, holding up the constitution, willing to sacrifice children on the altar of our right to bear arms.
America, this America, hasn't valued human life since its inception. It is built on death. It is drenched in blood.
So why, now, are we shocked - why do we offer thoughts and prayers - when another school shooting shows us the ugliness of our society? That ugliness has always been there. It is where we live.
I cannot comprehend this country's willingness to offer up children to this feckless god of selfish individualism.
A part of my job as a paraeducator in a public elementary school was helping children during lockdown drills. I worked in special education, and it was imperative that I kept my students calm and quiet while we locked the doors, turned off the lights, sat silently in a corner of the room, away from the windows. I remember very clearly the last drill I helped facilitate - I looked at all those tiny first grade faces and imagined the worst. Would I stand to defend them? Would I shield them with my body? Would anything really help to stop a madman with an assault rifle?
Who would these children be, if they were permitted by this cruel and callous world to grow up? All of those students had limitless potential. All of them deserved life, a happy life, a life of kindness and compassion and joy.
And our country simply does not care. Not about them, not about the murdered babies at Sandy Hook, not about the teens killed yesterday Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, not about any of the children in the 18 school shootings in 2018 alone, not about the young people for whom violence is a part of their daily lives.
Many Americans do care - don't get me wrong. There is mourning, and there is grief. In the aftermath of this most recent shooting, I've seen many people speaking to our need for adequate gun control. I've witnessed newscasters and politicians and regular citizens break down in sorrow. But that individual and collective grief stands in strife against the innate American selfishness, the denial of our national sins, the whitewashing of history, the willingness to refuse our culpability for genocide and persecution.
Our country is built on a faulty foundation, and it crumbles every day.
I want to believe that things will change. Surely we can take our cue from other countries who have restricted access to firearms. We can look to Australia, perhaps, and their reaction to a mass shooting - they did not want that horror to happen again, and they took action. We can acknowledge that America leads the world - when it comes to gun violence and mass incarceration - and say, no. Enough. This is not acceptable. This is not what we want for our children.
But to do that is to cure the fundamental illness of our country, and I'm not sure if we are ready. If it can be done.
We must abandon selfishness - the very selfishness which allows citizens to purchase firearms. The selfishness which makes some schools better than others. The selfishness of privilege, of corporate tax breaks, of private health insurance companies, of gerrymandering, of conservatism. Of ignoring the long term consequences of slavery. Of prioritizing the individual over the whole.
Too many children have died.
When will we open our eyes and say, no more?
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