Every kid we let die is another step towards letting it happen again
What if we cared about our society's only redeeming qualities?
Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images.
It was the wake of the Uvalde, Texas shooting that left nineteen kids and two teachers dead. I slumped in my bus seat, shirt sticking from the stuffy air, brows beginning to sore from their persistent furrow. My head pounded from scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, mechanized motion that just meant discovering more. More devastating details of the shooting. More ways the police went wrong—and proceeded to try covering it all up. More inanities like the NRA convention amazingly carrying on, featuring headliner remarks from Texas’s very own Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott.
Behind me sat an older woman clutching in her lap a small dog with curly light brown fur. Next to her perched a boy about 3 or 4 years old. The boy chattered away throughout the ride, the woman alternating between chatting on her phone and cooing to the dog after any yips or sneezes, interrupting the routine only to softly answer any of the ongoing stream of questions from the kid.
The trio’s soundscape continued throughout the drive, but one thing the boy said unanticipatedly pierced through. By chance, I caught the context-less tail end of his assurance: “…it’s just a mistake Gramma,” he insisted. “Mistakes are okay!”
Kids can be unrefined and messy and naive. “Immature.” But this supposed immaturity makes them often the most candid and genuine and uncorrupted among us. And to recognize the pure innocence, the sincere and forgiving way children experience the world—no less in the wake of a tragedy in which nineteen of these souls were brutally taken—is just profoundly affecting.
This feeling doesn’t just stem from witnessing how America has fully accepted the possibility and ongoing tragedies of children being murdered at school. It comes too from how openly we are totally surrendering our innocence. The continual senseless murder of schoolchildren is not only the killing of human beings—it embodies a complete forfeiting of where much of our society’s purest sincerity, our most unhesitating faith in the world lies: kids.
Growing up, I’ve often heard in some manner or another that the older one ages, the more cynical or hardened they become. Whether because the world’s troubles come to appear insurmountable, or due to some impulse to just accept the world as is, or simply out of a need to remove one’s own culpability from the world’s problems, an optimism or baseline standard for what is and isn’t acceptable is apparently naïveté. Acclimating oneself, lowering expectations, adapting to an insufficient world means to “grow up.”
So we are meant to adapt to the insufficiencies of this world beset with mass shootings, let alone the routine gun violence that haunts America every day. Consider what kinds of incomprehensibly possible things we are meant to adapt to, for instance, just from Uvalde.
The morning’s honor roll ceremony celebrating academic achievement, only for at least three honorees to be mowed down hours later. Two of these honorees used to text each other “I love you” before going to bed every night. Their families chose to bury them next to each other.
Another four children left behind after their teaching mother was shot and killed and her husband, the kids’ father, died of a heart attack two days after.
An 11-year-old spending early June not on summer vacation, but instead testifying to Congress about her friends dying and how she covered herself in blood to play dead so she wouldn’t be shot and killed too.
In sum, nineteen kids and two teachers killed. Each leaving reverberating pain in their wake. Potential, innocence, basic life and livelihood all ripped away.
Uvalde’s devastating consequences are borne not just from stubborn inaction, but an insistence that better things are not possible. An undying belief—in a world otherwise characterized by needless death—that the “mature,” if not simply inevitable, response to the inadequacies of our world is resignation, passive acceptance.
Worse is how self-affirming this position is. For a culture to hold that things cannot get better, and that with age comes acceptance of this notion, ensures that things will remain as they are, and likely worsen. It is not only a rejection of the optimism and expectation found in the spirit of youth, it is also a total abandonment of the literal youth who maintain that spirit. Such a culture kills its innocence in every possible sense—it is one actively opposed to preserving its most redeeming qualities, and averse to fulfilling even basic biological or moral imperatives to protect and support future generations.
Such self-destructive behavior cannot possibly be the standards we think of as normal, conventional wisdom. Maybe us adapting to a transparently insufficient world isn’t a reasonable or inevitable course of action. Maybe we ought not lower our expectations, but instead embrace the pure essences of belief and idealism and trust seen and felt most profoundly in our youth—the standards we really do hold before encountering a culture that insists we abandon such ideals.
If we are serious in any sense of preserving the best parts of ourselves—hope, sincerity, optimism—then we have to allow ourselves the grace and will to still believe in them. Otherwise we risk losing not just those qualities, but the young spirited souls who beckon us towards their fleeting existences.
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Beautiful thoughts and words. I often ask myself why idealism is viewed so negatively when the lack thereof is—in my opinion— one of the sources of the worlds problems. Thank you for the article