Not Hopeless

This week, every parent and every educator I know is feeling the weight of the pervasive gun violence we have been living with in this country. This latest incident of preventable violence, where teachers lost their lives trying to protect children, who also lost their lives, comes on the heels of a separate incident just a short time before, when Black people were the targets of purposeful slaughter in yet another mass murder that would never have happened if our elected officials would do the will of the majority and enact common sense regulatory measures. 

These two crimes stand out for their heinousness, but as we are all acutely aware, mass murder by firearms cannot be described as exceptional or surprising in the US. In fact, we are home to so many such incidents that they don’t even get widely reported anymore. In addition, guns are dangerous for the people who own them– having a gun in the house vastly increases the likelihood of a family member dying by suicide, and also increases the likelihood of domestic violence escalating into murder. Children and young people are killed by guns more than any other cause of death. 

It is important to recognize the connection between our nation’s acceptance of civilians owning weapons designed for killing lots of people at once, and our national history of chattel slavery, with which we have not yet fully reckoned. From 1619 to 1865, 246 years, Americans reconciled the kidnapping of people from their homes and lands and forcing them into lifelong labor under brutal conditions, almost unimaginable to us today. We think of ourselves as a nation of laws and justice, but those laws enshrined this kidnapping, imprisonment, rape, mutilation, forced labor, and all the rest of it as fair, just, and legal. Our fellow Americans explained how that could be acceptable through an ideology that today we call racism. At its essence, racism exists to justify oppression that is convenient and comfortable for those whom it benefits. 

A major problem for our American ancestors who institutionalized racism, wrote it into our laws and rights, was that they had imported so many kidnapped individuals and enslaved them that there were enough to plausibly overpower the beneficiaries of the precarious system. Murder, violence, and intimidation were the natural byproduct: a way for those committed to the social order to ensure compliance from a most unwilling populace. Calls to attend to this fear and use violence to bring security continue to be employed quite explicitly in communications to Americans who are still today the beneficiaries of racism. 

American officials aren’t stopping gun violence because they know that the fear of an uprising of oppressed people is still incredibly effective at mobilizing those committed to maintaining the social order. 

We love order. We fear chaos, change, and transitions. That part of our brain that is activated when we feel afraid makes us act as if we are caged animals, backed into a corner. People in power who want to retain that power have teams of analysts who have perfected the art of keeping people afraid, so they can’t think things through. Simultaneously, we as a people have chosen to fund militarization and policing while short-changing education and social programs, systematically, for decades. It’s not a coincidence. It’s strategic, and it is working. 

But this won’t be the whole story. History takes a long time while you’re living it, and I too feel impatient for change, on a societal level and in our laws and rights. In my view, it is realistic to expect that conditions here will get worse still– a future I do not relish, but accept to ward off more crushing disappointment. 

When I feel despair at our national culture and current events, I find it helpful to take a longer view. My wise son said to me, on the way to school the morning after Uvalde, in reference to politicians taking no action to stop this violence, despite the vast majority of Americans supporting reform, “when are those guys going to realize that when you oppose the will of the people, it usually doesn’t end well?”. Despite a perpetually strapped school district, and underpaid teachers having to train for active shooter situations, and an educational system that prioritizes a model where real learning is subsumed to being able to successfully navigate standardized tests under conditions in which the needs of children were never accounted for, they are learning. They are thinking. They can get it. 

Being engaged in the education of our children, as parents and teachers, is revolutionary. My son will be a voter in five short years. There has been a tremendous surge of parents committed to changing the way we talk with kids that acknowledges their humanity and prepares them to be citizens in a way that authoritarian parenting models never could. Our generation of parents is part of shifting the tide, from controlling people (as always, CHILDREN ARE PEOPLE) through threats, intimidation, and violence, to empowering people to use our voices, be counted, and be accountable to each other. This is what we do; this is the work at Cottage. And because I do this every day, even early on a Saturday morning like now, I do not feel hopeless. I know that day by day, child by child, family by family, we are making change.