thoughts, prayers, action

I was at a McDonald’s on December 14th, 2012. I recall standing there with my at-the-time girlfriend who I would later marry, have children with, and divorce getting a snack before going into our respective shifts at the restaurant that employed both of us at the time. There was a television in the back that would usually crank out CNN’s twenty-four hour news cycle on repeat throughout the day and, at the time, I was a freshly-minted adult-a mere eighteen years of age-and therefore, had neither the life experience nor the desire to be informed or interested in anything that I would generally find meeting my eye on that screen.

But that day was different because it was on that day that the United States would be sent into collective shock and grief when a man not much older than I was at the time walked into Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and took twenty-six lives including those of twenty elementary school-aged children. The murder of a child has always been and will always be impossibly difficult to stomach, but such a senseless, reasonless murder on this scale was one of the most disgusting, blood-curdling acts to slip into my stream of perception at this point in my life. I had grown up in the shadow of the tragic Columbine shooting, but there was an immediately perceptible, yet somehow very difficult to explain line of demarcation between that and what happened in Newtown that day.

I’m sure many people my age can relate to the notion of coming into a form of consciousness in the post-9/11 world in which the world seemed so constantly engulfed in chaos that it would take something truly jarring-something so unthinkable-to truly rattle us. I was no different than many of my peers in that respect. My family was vaguely conservative, but rarely was there ever a truly coherent opinion presented to me that gave cause to any sort of exploration into my own political identity. Instead, my ideological development came from a common, but nonetheless very dangerous place: the internet. In today’s climate of non-stop, in your face online political activism (or at the very least virtue-signaling and posturing), you can assume that if you start to veer into the dark side of politics (read as conservatism if you’re in the US), someone, somewhere will be there to jump out and scare the wrong out of you from their corner of the internet. But a mere decade ago, this was extraordinarily less of the case and you were always just a YouTube rabbit hole or two away from finding some unabashed libertarianism or worse. I personally realized how easy it was to fall into this trap at that age and, were it not for the help of some extraordinary women in my life, I likely would have succumbed to such a nugget of ideological nonsense as that in a much more difficult-to-repair way.

But not everyone is as fortunate as I was in that respect. In the past decade, we’ve seen thousands of mass shootings in the US and little (if any) legislative action to mitigate the horrific violence that we’ve all started becoming desensitized to. The predominant motivating ideology for the perpetrators of these heinous acts is white nationalism/white supremacy. This is not an opinion of mine, but rather a cold, uncomfortable, and indisputable fact. There is nothing particularly easy or pleasant about confronting this vile underbelly of society that has become all too comfortable in recent years to show its ugly face repeatedly, but if we hope to stop these people from continuing to violently seize power from us by means of dominating the attention economy, it is our duty to do so.

Now surely, some of those who will read this diatribe of mine will read that last sentence and say “there’s nothing hard or uncomfortable about confronting racism/racists and it’s cowardly to frame it as such”. I would’ve once been one of those people, but that’s only because I would have at that point in my own political development not confronted how deeply the darkness of racism and white supremacy had infected every facet of the United States both in domestic and foreign policy. See, how are we to condemn the prejudiced attack of the man who took the lives of ten black people in a grocery store in Buffalo if we do not condemn our country’s ally Israel in its creation of an apartheid state with dominion over the Palestinian people? How do we condemn the man who killed nine black people at a church in Charleston if we do not condemn our own government’s plunder and pillage of the global south? And even if we remove race from the equation, how the fuck am I, a parent, supposed to condem the murder of nineteen elementary school aged children children two hours away from me in Uvalde, Texas and in the same breath be complicit in the bombing and shelling of schools and hospitals by our government’s hand in the middle east?

The short answer is that I cannot hold such cognitive dissonance so I instead choose rage over all of it. Living with such a rage is difficult. The unfettered cynicism that consumes me when it comes to every political/politicized issue that arises has not only had a hugely negative impact on my person but on countless personal relationships. My faith in the institutions that we are supposed to be able to rely on to serve justice to those who would prioritize their own capital gain and/or power over human life has long since faded and I’m left feeling powerless, hopeless, and defeated when yet another senseless loss of life enters my periphery such as the aforementioned massacre in Uvalde.

However, this one struck a different chord for me. It is only in these very moments in which I type these words that it occurs to me how much the predominant emotion that I’ve experienced through every global tragedy for years has been anger; how much my knee-jerk reaction has always been to let rage inspire action instead of sitting back and allowing myself to feel. With Uvalde, I felt my immediate response differently.

Today, I’m sad. Very sad. Like, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve cried since I first read the news last night kind of sad. Today, I realized that the last time I felt sadness hit me like a brick due to some form of current event was nearly ten years ago in the lobby of a McDonalds when an eighteen-year-old Alexander learned that twenty kids my younger siblings’ ages had just been massacred in Connecticut. Today, I realized that nearly a decade later, nineteen children barely older than my children had just been massacred in Texas and that not a god damn thing has been done about it by the powers that be who are supposed to make the decisions necessary to protect us. None of the letters to my representatives, none of the petitions, none of the organizing, none of the rallying and protesting, none of the volunteer work, none of the donations, none of the voting that I’ve done in my career as an adult have done a single fucking thing to keep something like this from happening. The saddest part about this is knowing it will happen again and knowing that I possess no power to stop it.

Now what? Now my daughters start school this fall and I just have to send them off to class every day hoping that they come back? Is that the world I live in now? Has it always been? I guess there’s no fair way to answer that last one, but I now feel confident in saying that even if the world was not always this way that it, at least, always will be. How am I to get frustrated with people for expressing “thoughts and prayers” when shit like this happens when their thoughts and prayers are effectually identical to the countless actions that myself and so many others have taken to try and repair the broken institutions that have so unabashedly failed us so many times?

The system is broken and that’s not new news, but it hurts when one of its many cracks and faultlines shows itself in such a way as this. This dissertation doesn’t turn around and become happy, poignant, and full of solutions either. I’ve been trying to encourage everyone to do the “right” thing and act to stop such tragedy over and over again until I’ve gone blue in the face for a decade and accomplished nothing. I’ve written countless polemics rallying against hopelessness in an era of never-ending darkness and atrocities for as long as I remember.

But today? Today, I’m tired, I’m sad, I’m scared, and I have no solutions. Today, I have about as much to offer as that kid ten years ago wiping tears from underneath his eyes in between bites of a quarter pounder with cheese. Today, I guess it’s just thoughts and prayers.