school shootings – *the gratitude-a-thon

gratitude-a-thon day 2035: march for our lives with hope: the kids

March 25, 2018March 25, 2018UncategorizedLeave a Comment

I didn’t make it to D.C. yesterday, but I did make it to Boston Common’s March for Our Lives, where thousands and thousands of kids were out in force and demanding more from our politicians concerning gun control. They acted responsibly, spoke articulately and were passionate and clear about what they want and deserve from lawmakers. They were experiencing the high of activism–that kind of out-of-this-world energy you get from taking to the streets with others and telling the world that you’re not going to take it anymore. Or anyway, you’re not going to take it sitting silently. I hope this becomes an addiction. Because these kids seem to be on a positive path of getting shit done.

And there were plenty of older people, too. There to support this generation, who just might make something happen that we have not been able to pull off.

I don’t have enough words, enough yahoo’s, enough yippee’s or pats on the back for these well-organized kids who have given me hope about gun reform for the first time in my adult life. This is a real moment. This is the way things change. Did you hear that Mr. President, or were your golf clubs in the way?

Gratitude to the current generation of get-it-done, we’re-not-backing-down, we-deserve-more, don’t-shoot, NEW OR ABOUT TO BE NEW VOTERS. You wow me.

gratitude-a-thon day 471: what’s it going to take?

November 21, 2014November 21, 2014Uncategorized3 Comments

Another day, another school shooting. Don’t worry if you missed it, there will be plenty of others. Maybe next week. Or next month. Or maybe even tomorrow.

It’s ordinary now, to go to grammar school, high school, or college and expect that a student might turn into a rabid John Wayne. It’s a graduation requirement now that you know what to do if a guy with a gun comes into the library, or the art room, or shows up in the fucking hallway telling you that he’s going to kill you. Kill you, right there in the confines of the place your parents send you to because for years and years it’s been a place that was safe to spend the day learning.

But it’s different now. Now it’s different.

We have lockdown drills. We had one just the other day at Brookline High School, which my daughter missed because we were visiting her brother at a big university where a gunman could show up tomorrow. Or tonight. Who knows. It’s a thing now. It’s a thing to kill people at school. Kids at school. KIll them dead, because you’re depressed, or because you’re unhappy, or because nobody is paying enough attention to you to notice that you need some assistance, or just because you can get a gun, and in moment of despair, that gun can speak the words that you cannot.

This is our country 2014-style. Kids not only have to cope with being cool, they have to cope with thinking about who it is in their class that might bring a gun to school tomorrow and kill them. Um. Yeah.

And what are we doing, we adults, we educated adults, educated during a time when people brought lunch boxes to school and not weapons, WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THIS?

I can tell you what we should be doing. We should be standing in the middle of every street in D.C. until there are stricter gun laws and improved mental health care coverage. We should stand there and block traffic with signs, screaming at the top of our lungs. Because this, killing kids, in the prime of their lives, in the place they go to learn, is unacceptable. It’s just fucking unacceptable. What’s it going to take to get you there? A text from your own child that says: “There’s a gunman in the library. I love you.”

gratitude-a-thon day 412: at least more kids weren’t killed (what a sad gratitude)

June 11, 2014June 11, 2014Uncategorized4 Comments

When I was a kid, it was assassinations. In line at the First National, our favorite grocery store check out lady, Stella, a small woman with a foot of sprayed black hair on her head told us that President Kennedy had been killed. I was four and I watched my mom cry. At nine, I had my tonsils out and was in a lot of pain. In the middle of the night, my dad woke me up and carried me downstairs to the tv and said, “Robert Kennedy was shot, this is history.” Earlier that year, in April, Martin Luther King was also assassinated, stripping the country of a man who changed it. Three in a row.

Now it’s school shootings. There have been 74 since Sandy Hook, a town that I grew up next door to. What are we doing? What’s going on? How can this have happened 74 times since that massacre in Newtown? I want to stand in the street today and scream that we have to save our kids. I feel like I’m watching some lame movie and yelling from the audience, “Just change the gun laws. Awww, this is such a stupid plot, why isn’t anybody changing the gun laws?”

Our kids are going to school and not coming home. And not because they’re kissing in the back seat of a car, or smoking in the woods. No, it’s much worse than that. School has historically been a place that was safe. But that’s changed. And somehow I feel, we’re all just letting it happen. Are we getting desensitized to the sound bite, the “breaking news” that “there’s been another school shooting.”

This is clearly a multi dimensional issue made up of gun laws and mental health access, but it’s also something else. Something that I wonder about. What is it about this time in our history that has made kids act out in this particular way? Certainly there were students that were mentally unbalanced and had access to guns when I was a kid, who didn’t put them in their back packs with their bologna sandwiches, and plans to shoot up the student council. Why? What’s different? Is it increased social pressure, from the smiling faces on social media? Is it the violence of video games? Is it the shoot ’em up movies Hollywood is producing? Is it the isolation that can come by way of a generation glued to their computers? Those are all things that were not present in my childhood. And so I wonder, is this combination of things that have tipped troubled kids into acting out by killing their classmates?

I don’t have any answers. Except one. We have to do what we can to make gun laws stricter TODAY. Before this happens again. And before we are no longer moved when it does.