What do you do when your belief system allows for the murder and rape of children? What do you do when the things that the leaders you trust have said to you, messages their media figures have inundated you with, when the outcome of that is the destruction of kids? A sane person would want to repent, get out, try to change. But we are a nation filled with incoherent rage and fuck-everyone-but-me-and-mine madness. Lemme explain.
In Texas, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District has a police department. According to its webpage, "The primary goal for the Uvalde CISD Police Department is to maintain a safe and secure environment for our future leaders to learn and our current leaders to educate while forming partnerships with students, teachers, parents, and the community while enforcing laws and reducing fears." Do you understand that? Like many places around the country, the schools have their own cops. And, in nearly every case of a school shooting, the cops or security officers failed to even hinder the shooter.
Like so many things about Uvalde, it demonstrates the utter failure of all the ludicrous bullshit that conservatives throw at us. The Uvalde cops were shit-scared, even with the military equipment they had, pictured looking so goddamned tough, just more security theatre, which is about 75% of American policing, all screaming and tasers and shooting unarmed people. But the truth is that the fucking guns, man, the fucking guns are too much for them. They pissed themselves rather than risk their lives. It's disgraceful and disgusting and all of the cops who stood outside the classroom or sat in their cars should be fired. If they have any self-respect left at all, they should quit first.
Also, look at the Preventive Security Measures document for the UCISD. Robb Elementary "has fencing that encloses the campus [and] is designed to limit and/or restrict access to individuals without a need to be on the campus." It advises, "Teachers are instructed to keep their classroom doors closed and locked at all times." Do you understand that part?
They fucking were supposed to do it all, all those things that conservatives say schools need in order to be secure in our fucked beyond fucked post-Columbine, post-Newtown nation. Good guys with guns. Extra security. It was all there and it didn't fucking matter because the one factor that got those 19 kids and two teachers slaughtered was the guns, and we have a crazed minority in this country with a fuckton of cash that prevents anything from being done about the goddamn guns when most of the country knows that it's the guns, even most of those who say it's not the guns know it's the fuckin' guns.
Every cop organization in the country should be agitating for military-style rifles to be banned and that there should be more laws restricting gun ownership. If not, you're saying that you don't give a shit that your officers are gonna get killed, too. Or that they shouldn't try to stop an armed fucknut from slaughtering kids.
The United States has failed its children. We have decided that it’s better to be armed than worry about the occasional massacre. We have decided that it’s better that the seas rise and the temperatures soar and the droughts and fires wreak destruction than to actually do the work of moving off fossil fuels. And how many churches need to cover up massive sex crimes against children before we start treating them like a criminal enterprise, like the Mafia with an omerta against ratting out child rapists. What more do you want to do to kids?
And what of this conservative ideology that is supposed to be about protecting children within the bounds of traditional family, within a traditional public education system, within the churches that are supposed to inculcate traditional values? If that ideology has led to piles of murdered children inside classrooms, if it has led to thousands of children being raped by leaders in the Southern Baptist Church, the very heart of the evangelical movement that has so poisoned this country and whose leaders are treated like sages instead of pariahs, then that ideology is corrupt and profane and debased. It needs to be burned to the ground, degraded to the point where all who so much as whisper its tenets are seen as fools who need to be banished to the political and social hinterlands until and unless they scourge themselves clean.
You right-wing motherfuckers spent time banning books about gender identity and banning lessons in the cruel history of the United States, a savage heritage that you are doing nothing to counter. You decided it was more important to get gay and lesbian teachers out of schools than it was to keep weapons of war out of people’s hands. You should be forced to live in a classroom with the ripped apart bodies of 19 children rotting in front of you. You goddamned ghouls should never get a moment’s peace or happiness the rest of your miserable, cocksucking lives.
And if you believe that a kid saying she’s transgender is worse than a school shooting, you should never be allowed to comment in public again. I mean, Jesus fuck, the kids from Robb Elementary are turning to GoFundMe to pay for the therapy they'll need. It's trauma and cruelty on top of trauma and cruelty. Anyone who thinks that's okay should never be allowed near children, let alone writing policy that affects them.
I have written so much about guns, so much about Christian fundamentalism, and I don’t know if I’m repeating myself anymore. Post-Reagan conservatism is, at its heart, at its base, a death wish because of the insane adherence to fundamentalist Christianity, which sees our time on earth as a way station before the bliss of the grave when your soul can join Jesus. Of course the guns don’t matter. Of course the deaths of children don’t matter. Why, those kids are lucky that they get to be with Christ so soon and not suffer all the awful sins of existing as a physical being. If you’re bathed in the blood of Christ, then what does it matter if your blood bathes the walls of the elementary school. It's madness, and it should be treated as madness.
Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of talking about what complete, breathtakingly fucked hypocrites Republicans are. They call us “groomers”? Please, SBC. They call us baby killers? They call themselves “pro-life”? It’s a fucking joke. They’re a fucking joke. Go after guns. Go after evangelicals. And stop trying to say there are any "good" Republicans. Just because Liz Cheney hates Donald Trump doesn't mean that she's a motherfucking hero. She's gonna vote for more guns and fewer voting rights and more abortion restrictions and bans. Fuck her. Destroy the word "Republican." Wreck "conservative." Make it poisonous because it is. We have thousands of dead and traumatized children to prove it.
One day, perhaps, in a future that I’m not sure is going to happen, historians will hopefully look back on this era and write new textbooks for kids at school. Those textbooks will hopefully talk about how a cabal of wealthy fucks tried to hide the past from its children while at the same time allowing those same children to live in a nation that requires them to learn how to attempt to survive being massacred in their classroom. Those historians will hopefully teach the kids of the future the cruelty of the leaders who thought a book about being gay was more obscene than children's bodies being shredded by bullets. And those historians will hopefully say that this was just a continuation of the very violence and hatred at the core of America's story, that what those terrible people were trying to hide was themselves.
If we don't do better, if we don't take this anger we have right now, this despair, this sorrow and turn it into action, then we deserve to be a footnote in that history. And that footnote will say that we knew that an ideology of hatred and violence was ruining another generation, yet we still failed to do everything we could to stop it. We failed to save ourselves or our kids.
Let's not be like the Uvalde cops.
