Have you ever tried to change a fitted sheet at the end of a really long day?
You forgot you’d stripped the bed, and now your arms are lead and one corner keeps popping up, and before you know it you’re cross legged and in tears on the bedroom floor.
No? Just me?
Well, that’s how I felt reading the news of the 19 children and 2 teachers murdered by a gunman who then turned his weapon on himself in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Texas two days ago.
Exhausted. Enraged. Hopeless.
And if you think it’s callous of me to compare the spilled blood of nine-year-olds to something as mundane as changing bedsheets, you’re right enough.
But the discourse in the 36 hours following this tragedy has been just that – mundane.
Another news cycle of thoughts and prayers (no use to dead bairns) and political posturing and hashtags and no actual change.
Shootings are the single biggest cause of death for American children and teens.
(Read that again. Feel the ache in your heart. Become sensitised again for a minute.)
Yet it’s becoming so common that it’s no longer shocking. Just “another one.”
Isn’t that a sick state of things?
Derry Girls wised up – why haven’t we?
Last night, a week late, I watched the series finale of the beloved (and usually hilarious) Derry Girls.
I thought it would cheer me up.
Instead, I once again ended up in tears at the foot of my bed.
This time, it wasn’t the fitted sheet but an overwhelming feeling of fatigue and history repeating itself that got me all weepy, as I watched Clare, Orla, James, Erin and even mouthy Michelle “catch themselves on” for an hour and vote for peace in the form of the Good Friday Agreement.
The “gyarls” (and James) have lodged themselves in my heart and millions of others as we’ve watched them grow up in 90s Derry during the Troubles.
And as they got ready to leave school, childhood and our screens forever, we saw the friends consider (and fall out over) the peace agreement that we now take for granted as the right answer in our shared history.
We saw an uncertain Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) waver over the idea that paramilitary prisoners would be released as part of the peace agreement, fearing violence would break out all over again.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she asks cantankerous Granda Joe (Ian McElhinney).
“What if it does?” Granda Joe replies with a proper grandad twinkle.
“What if no one else has to die?”
I was away.
Not because it was beautiful (which it was) but because I realised that Erin and her lot had something which I just don’t see in today’s pleas for peace.
Hope.
Hope? In this economy?
Asking people to lower their weapons and their prejudices is asking them to trust each other.
It’s a scary thing to do – to trust on a grand scale.
It’s what needs to happen in the US if there is any hope of getting folk to just put the guns down.
Every person must trust every other one, a little bit more than they do now.
But as Derry Girls shows, the people of Northern Ireland were persuaded to do that because of mutual hope for a better future.
Thing is, it’s hard to hope for a better future when billionaires are buying up the Internet, red tape is keeping Ukrainian kiddos in warzones, and your political leaders are partying while people die, scared and alone, from the new and terrifying viruses ripping across a terminally overheating planet.
It feels like even the best case scenario pretty much sucks.
So the motivation to trust one another has to come from somewhere other than hope.
Maybe it has to come from hopelessness instead.
No more shooting’s worth a shot
One of the primary arguments for the American right to bear arms is for personal protection.
But in order to have a “good guy” with a gun (ie the one doing the protecting) there must first be a “bad guy” with a gun (the one doing the threatening).
So even in its most passive motives, the very act of owning a gun is a signal of mistrust.
Maybe it’s justified. Maybe humans actually can’t be trusted not to do each other harm.
After all, even with ceasefires and amnesties, people in Scotland and Northern Ireland still hurt one another, still kill.
But we don’t have police shootouts in the street and we don’t have school massacres. Not after Dunblane. Not after Bloody Sunday.
It took those things happening once to teach a generation it could never happen again.
And we know that as long as folk have guns, folk are going to get shot.
Innocent folk.
Kids. 19 at a time. Gone, and then forgotten by the news cycle as quick.
This is a desperate reality. This is the worst-case scenario.
So sure, when it comes to gun reforms, or to shaping The Future, we may not feel like we have much left to hope for.
But at this hopeless point in history? We’ve got absolutely nothing to lose.
It’s got to be worth a try.
If only so we can crawl into bed and, finally, sleep at night.
Remember their names
The names of the identified victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting are listed below. May they rest in peace.
Uziyah Garcia
Xavier Lopez
Amerie Jo Garza
Jose Flores Jr.
Alithia Ramirez
Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez
Eliahana Cruz Torres
Eliahna “Ellie” Garcia
Rojelio Torres
Jacklyn Cazares
Jailah Nicole Silguero
Jayce Carmelo Luevanos
Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio
Tess Mata
Makenna Lee Elrod
Eva Mireles (Fourth grade teacher)
Irma Garcia (Fourth grade teacher)
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