Plowshares

Nineteen children and two of their teachers were murdered in Texas yesterday and I have no intention of engaging with it. I’m truly sorry for that community’s tragedy, but I can’t help them and I can’t prevent it from happening again. Not with my votes, not with my donations, not with my woebegone tweet thread loaded with statistics decrying right wing hypocrisy. Certainly not with my thoughts and prayers. Sandy Hook, an even worse massacre, occurred 10 years ago when our social bonds were less of a shambles than they are now, and it brought about no meaningful change. In fact, a guy made a very successful career out of calling that massacre a hoax, which eventually made him influential enough to help put a human-shaped shit stain in the White House. So anyone who thinks this latest pile of dead kids will be the straw that broke the NRA’s back is a fool.

This doesn’t mean I’m not angry about it. It’s just subsumed into the ambient rage I feel every day about an intractable injustice. It’s a known quantity I’ve learned to live with. If gun violence one day affects me directly, that rage will return to the foreground. But until then, there are more than enough infuriating things right in front of me to absorb all my available anger. I am, for example, far more likely to be killed by a motorist than a gunman. In fact, my dog and I were very nearly hit by a car just this morning, on the fucking sidewalk. I emphasize that statement as if it were some sort of freak occurrence, but half a block away, at that very moment, a family was loading their kids into another car parked on that same sidewalk, which they routinely treat as their personal driveway.

I can’t yank my dog out of the path of a compact SUV and grieve the latest casualties of this nation’s odious gun fetish at the same time. I’m not that good of a multitasker. I can’t harbor simultaneous fantasies of strangling that driver and strangling Mitch McConnell. I only have two hands. And they’re shaking.