In the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, a prayer for those affected

If you had a problem with masks robbing kids of their childhood and education, you should absolutely have a problem with active shooter drills, lockdowns and carnage. That certainly impacts their innocence and education.

If you’re waiting in hope of a Roe v Wade rollback, then you should be advocating for the dignity of living children. School should be where children go to learn, grow and be with friends, not to sit in terror as rounds and screams explode in a nearby classroom as fast as the attacker can pull the trigger. Or Heaven forbid, seeing the end of a barrel as they run or cower. That isn’t providing children dignity; it’s primitive savagery.

If “thoughts and prayers” were enough to effect change, we wouldn’t have seen such fierce pro-life advocacy since the early ’70s, right? The pro-life crowd knows intimately that change requires action so the routine “thoughts and prayers” without effort is finally seen for what it is: totally empty. Complete hogwash.

Now, I don’t want anyone confusing my derision of conservatives that accept both prevailing pro-life and second amendment logic with my deriding prayer.

I believe in prayer, so here it is:

God bless and keep these children: kids whose bodies were shattered by a high-velocity projectile two days away from summer break. Some were shot more than once. Kids who lived; kids who died; kids who will forever be traumatized by this.

God bless and keep their families. Parents nauseated and waiting at some school district appointed reunification center named deep within the student handbook. Mothers and fathers waiting in true purgatory, trapped, looking and waiting. And as families get reunited and they’re still pacing when does the awful reality set in: when no more kids show up? When all that’s left at the center are the families of the dead? An impromptu shiva made of protocol?

God bless and keep the siblings. Siblings who were also waiting. Siblings that saw. God bless and keep the families breathing with the wretched feeling of “thank God it wasn’t my kid…thank God my baby is here.” The horrible relief of that. Twenty-one extended families who will have to cleave to and lift nuclear families that are seizing in unnatural pain.

God bless and keep the neighbors and friends in Uvalde. They are hearing now of the who, when, where and marshaling their own resolve to mourn in community. That takes energy, compassion and grit: to meet anguish where it is. They are now the backstop of unbearable grief.

God bless and keep the first responders: police, EMS, fire and school officials who ran toward the school. I cannot imagine the scene that was presented that day. That care and love is evident when people run toward chaos. I don’t care for anti-police verbiage right now: would you volunteer to scar your soul with the violated, dead faces of 18 murdered children and three educators who tried to save them?

God bless the nurses, doctors and staff who are trying to save everyone at three hospitals.

Imagine two small-town hospitals flooded with close-proximity, high-caliber gunshot victims, most pediatric. To try and save them? That’s the hand of mercy, there. Those that hold us when we suffer and die are closer to God’s grace than just about anything.

And you know what? God bless the U.S.A., but I think, on this one, it’s high time we earn it and honor it. There’s zero “American exceptionalism” here save for the fact that we are a global exception. So for that I’ll pray, and I’ll act. I pray you do, too.