Soul crushing.
This is what I wrote this morning:
I no longer have faith in this country.
Money and power fuel every decision. Every bit of legislation.
Innocent citizens become the ‘collateral damage.’America is no longer what I once thought it was.
It has succumbed to madness.
People buying groceries, going to church, going to the movies, attending a concert. Children going to school. People going about their lives who are gunned down because our politicians are financed by the gun lobby and the NRA and will do NOTHING to stop the easy access to guns. That money is more important to them than the lives of innocent Americans.
No “thoughts and prayers.” I have news for you: God wants you to take action. Use your free will for something good.
I lost a beloved student to gun violence. He was murdered by a 17 year old girl who had easy access to a guns.
If I was younger, I’d leave this country. I no longer recognize it. I want nothing to do with it. Yes, I know we should fight. But, I’ve fought all my adult life and at this point, I’m damn tired.
Anyway, we can’t afford to leave. We’re stuck here.
Please, no lectures on taking action or voting or any of that. I have always been politically active. I never miss an election. I always vote. I donate to Everytown. I donate to the ACLU. I donate to the candidates I believe in. I sign petitions. I make calls. I write to my Senators and Representatives.
I’ve had it.
A word to the wise: If you’re going to leave an anti-gun control comment here, it will be deleted.
My father, when I was young, belonged to the NRA. We often argued about that. In later years, he left that organization. He wanted nothing more to do with it as it had become something he no longer recognized. The NRA had succumbed to the desire for power and money and control.
Always follow the money.
Every day, every hour, we hear of new atrocities. We see politicians selling their souls for power. We see them ignore climate change, health care, gun control. We see a Supreme Court that is bought and paid for.
Women are being forced to carry babies to term because of the ‘right to life’ but apparently that doesn’t matter once those babies are born. Then it’s every child for himself. Good luck kids!
In Texas, you can’t get an abortion, but you can purchase an AR-15 when you turn 18.
Amanda Gorman, the young poet, said this: “One nation, under guns.”
I’m rambling, I know. I’m heartsick.
Thank you for your wonderful comments yesterday. If you don’t mind, I won’t respond to them. I just don’t have it in me today. But please know they are appreciated.
Hug your loved ones today.
Stay safe.
Thank you! I am so angry at the senseless shoots. You said exactly what I am feeling.
After the election before this one, I told my family
If the grands were older, I would move to another country. There. I said it.
As you know I can’t handle the news anymore. When the notice of school shooting came on my new phone I was sick.
I did not sleep last night…therefore I am even more upset today. I am sure my BP is up. Not good.
I do not have the answers.
Well I do but no one listens who can change things. I am going to…well what will I do to put this yet again behind me?? I have no clue.
I do continue to pray and one person I mentor said
I do not know how your prayers are getting through but they are. If she only knew the times they have not been answered the way I want. I do believe we pray but we must take action also not sit back and wait for prayers to be answered. A cop out
Thinking of you
I agree with all your words. I, too, am heartsick and feel doomed that nothing, nothing will be done to stop the carnage of gun violence. Already some republicans have come out and said “the democrats are going to use this incident to take away your right to have guns.” What does one say to that crap? Then the all too common reaction.. we have to train are teachers to carry and shoot guns. They want to turn are schools into prisons with razor wire and armed guards. I do know that those ideas(?) are worthless and B.S.
Take Care,
Kaye
I am in complete agreement with you. I think we need to go beyond gun control, but that’s a start. I grew up in a house with guns. My husband hunts and we have some guns here (locked up). My children would never have considered taking a gun to school or anywhere else. What has changed in our society? How do we help these young men who are so disturbed? There are no easy answers. Better mental health care is needed badly. I have no real hope that anything will change.
My 9 y/o granddaughter told me recently that they had a shooter drill and she’s not going to wear her shoes that light up to school anymore because he might see them and shoot her. It just breaks my heart.
Take care
Your granddaughters comment about her shoes has brought me to tears. This horror has got to end.
Oh my goodness, that comment of your granddaughter’s! NO young child should EVER have to think like that.
The rest of the world shakes its collective head and we simply do not understand. We just don’t.
How is it acceptable that you even need to talk about “active shooter drills”? Here we have fire drills. In New Zealand they have earthquake drills. You have shooter drills. Senseless.
Do you know why we have to have active shooter drills? Because our family structure in this country has declined so badly. When i was a kid (40 years ago) I did not have a single kid in my class that had a divorced parent or even a single parent raising them. It was unheard of to have a suicide or mass shootings! Where the HELL are the parents in this country? Life is hard! You cannot expect kids to raise themselves and then expect them to be active members of society. The bigger question to all this, in my opinion, is what are we going to do with the decline of the family unit in this country! I’m so disgusted and sickened by all of it!
Dee, I can’t pretend to have an insight into your society but I do know that in my childhood (and I’m in my 60s) there were single parent families, teenage pregnancies, and divorce.
Just know that other countries, including mine, does still have single parents, divorce and teenage pregnancies.
We just don’t go around shooting each other.
It’s beyond sadness that a young child like your granddaughter should have the worry of planning ahead not to wear her beloved shoes to save her life from being shot. Give her an extra hug.
If only people buying guns had to adhere to the rules they want women to have to abide by to get an abortion. So the right to purchase a weapon to kill untold numbers is ok. But a woman’s right is selfish. It gets more and more ridiculous every day.
Insane, that’s all I can say.
in the darkness, may we all keep being a light (your list, claudia, is a good reminder … thank you).
take good care of yourselves and those you love.
💜
kathy
Amen to your post today.
Yes. Beyond sad and dispiriting.
ceci
Don’t even start me. We’ve looked into Canada but like you, we’re stuck here. Heartsick.
My oldest child has left this country and I understand completely. If my Grands didn’t live here I would consider it. I’m beyond heartbroken and angry. I just can’t understand.
Nothing to add, all so true.
You have eloquently expressed what I and many others are feeling.
Thank you for sharing.
Stay safe & well.
My thoughts exactly and so well said by you.
xoxoxo
There are no words
My grandparents immigrated from Sweden and I would move there in a heartbeat if I were young, but alas I’m too old to move and learn a new language. I’m stuck in a country I’m embarrassed by.
Amen. And may all worthless, paranoid, stupid cowards just implode now, without taking anyone with them. Just be gone.
I have been in tears and can no longer watch the coverage of this senseless tragedy. As a mother, grandmother and retired teacher, I feel helpless and weary. The NRA is having a meeting here in town starting tomorrow for their lobbying arm. Abbott, Cruz and Trump are all speaking. It incensed me. They are so tone deaf.
I taught kindergarten and during those last years I knew that some school day I might not make it back home alive. I made the decision that I’d protect my babies at whatever cost if someone threatened them. Needing to reassure thirty kindergartners during an active shooter/code red drill is a sad commentary on our country.
Mentally noting places to hide while shopping in a Walmart and feeling uneasy and exposed in movie theaters. Living in a state where many of my neighbors have gun safes and not knowing what access my kids had while visiting them. Going to a wedding this weekend and seeing a guest in a bright blue shirt festooned with gaudy pink roses and tan AK-47s. I certainly didn’t feel safer on a daily walk with a retired highway patrolman carrying a pistol (I walk with his wife but he was a tag along one day).
I don’t have any answers. It feels like an uphill climb and no end in sight.
Take care and hug someone you love.
Such a powerful post from you today, Claudia. You could put into words what I haven’t been able to. My husband and I spent much of last night crying … and furious. All the beautiful people young and old we’ve lost in just this last round of shootings (Buffalo, Southern Calif, now Uvalde), every race, every gender, from all walks of life; it’s a staggering and needless and senseless loss of precious human lives. And in just 11 days. I’ve read that at the Uvalde school in small-town Texas (I have relatives who live in that area), it’s mostly children from financially-challenged families, so you know darn well that those grieving parents can’t even afford (without difficulty) a casket or a funeral for the babies wrenched from their arms.
My husband was indeed despairing last night of the continuing breakdown in our American society. Where we could be headed. Where we already are. Losing hope. How we’re crumbling from within which my parents always taught me would be America’s downfall. I think a majority of us are asking (when we’re not pleading, why, why, why, why), “What can we do?” Gun violence; lack of gun control; young, disturbed male teens/men who need psychological help — it seems bigger than us; an overwhelming and multi-faceted problem. I don’t know what to do except vote for candidates who have integrity and who’ll stick to what they’ve promised in our elections, although it’s not enough; hasn’t been enough.
But I can’t help but feel wary when I leave my house to do normal things; normal errands. My husband wanted to see the new Top Gun movie at an IMAX theater (I’ve only done that twice in my life at one of those large movie houses); we’ve decided not to do it; doesn’t seem safe, and not just because of Covid surge. I guess you could call it ‘bowing’ to a domestic terrorist and I don’t like the feeling of ‘caving’ and indeed being afraid (it disgusts me), but I don’t want to die in a group setting where some mentally-ill killer (copycatting another murderer) could be in the audience, being closed up in a building with him where he could shoot me at close range.
(I still can hardly believe that Dave Chappelle was rushed on stage by that whacko, who very well could have knifed him; our Hollywood Bowl here in Southern Calif is a cherished place, outdoors, lovely; I’ve been there several times for concerts. “What if” that could have gone another way; how much could the audience members have been in danger, too? Clearly there can never be enough ‘Security’; we’re still vulnerable in public.)
As one Uvalde resident said when being interviewed on TV, “If it can happen in Uvalde, it can happen anywhere.” I don’t like seeing the schools I attended in my own youth being locked up — I see it every day in this town where I still live and where I was raised, the school buildings behind ugly chain-link fencing — but it is necessary, and who would have thought it to be so. Yesterday, there was a uniformed guard at the locked gate of my beautiful high school and I choked up, remembering how freely we teens roamed the large campus in the late-1960s (also a turbulent time in America, but nothing like THIS).
My husband didn’t tell me this earlier this morning because he knew it would be upsetting for me. But our grade school just around the corner (where I attended K-3 some 60-plus years ago; less than a half mile from my house I’m in right now) is very busy at 8am with cars lined up for as far as you can see in these days where parents are reluctant to let their children walk to school. Although the very-spread-out school with nice grounds/lawn (good amount of acreage, not crowded) is completely fenced in/protected with chain-link and big gates now, there was-today, 8am at the school’s main entrance, two parked sheriff’s cars and two uniformed policemen with guns, guarding the children walking in. I wondered if maybe they’d had a threat but my husband said, “I think they just can’t chance a threat; this is probably happening to schools all over the country this week because they’re concerned about copycat shootings.” How do you explain that to a 6-year-old?
As the day progressed today, my husband did go back to the vow that he will NOT change his life in fear of a gunman — because we have to LIVE and not cower. Going to the bank, the grocery store, the post office, the pharmacy, the garden center, the hardware store, the gasoline station. Small things to do in our small everyday life, but it’s our LIFE and he says we’re not gonna let somebody else steal it from us. Like Donnamae was saying, just have to hope we’re not ever in the wrong place at the wrong time. (And I’m still not going to go see the Top Gun movie at the theater. I’ve got my limits at the moment.)
I do note however in all the reader comments here, how much so many of us voice the wish we could move. Go somewhere else, where there’s more sanity and less trouble. Where there’s still hope for a life free from fear. Searching for just where IS that place in the world. I’ve definitely looked into it in the past seven years. It’s not an easy task to leave the U.S. for good, although there are a lot of U.S. ex-expatriates out there, living very well in other countries. If I was gonna do it, shoulda done it when I was a lot younger; thing is, when I was younger, there was no REASON to move and I had no DESIRE to move from the U.S. But, now, my husband and I are like everybody else here; stuck; we’re not going anywhere because we’re too old(er) and we can’t afford it. The better ex-pat candidates are wealthy retirees and younger people who can score a good job over the borders or overseas. So, instead of abandoning ship, my husband and I are just gonna have to figure this out, of how to help to effect any kind of positive change while also keeping ourselves safe and well.
I find I just feel so many things right now, like everybody; you can’t help but feel a lot of emotion (and variety of emotion) watching the news coverage. Tears constantly springing to my eyes, like so many other times of all these shootings (murders) over the weeks and years when you hope it’s the last one but it isn’t. On the one hand, as regards our country, its politics; and this tragic (and infuriating) problem of escalating gun violence, I feel … crestfallen. It’s just such a deep sense of sadness to see something that was so good (the U.S. and our lives here), get so much worse. It’s loss of another kind. What we’re getting taken away from us. How it chips at the soul; nags at the brain. When the rug under your feet no longer feels secure. It somewhat feels like being displaced; an uprooting. Nobody wants to lose belief in the motherland.
But then you have to think how the Ukraine citizens feel, having had to physically uproot. And my life tonight isn’t anything like what the Uvalde parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, first responders, and the survivors are going through. That’s unimaginable pain of loss. I don’t even know how you overcome it. Just shake my head in utter despair of what’s been taken from that Texas community; families changed forever. Special lives of such value now gone.
I’m sorry I’m so incoherent when I’m trying to comment. Thanks for the space to do so, Claudia. What terrible days.
The whole world’s gone mad and there’s no place to go!
Love from Germany!
Claudia, I’ve read your posts for quite a while, but never commented. Your words so often reflect my own feelings, and today I needed/wanted to echo your thoughts and eloquent words. Unbelievable sadness in this country.
I read your blog everyday but I have never commented. I want to thank you for every word you said today because that is how I feel. I live in Texas and you cannot believe how much my husband and I would love to get away but we are stuck here. We are hoping that our Governor, attorney general and lieutenant governor all lose in the November election.
I have a need to move, but don’t see how that is possible now, at this point in our lives. I think my London son and his wife have done the right thing….they bought a place in Edinburgh. They will be there forever if they can. I’m not sure any place is truly the best…but out of this country I feel is safer at least.
I am so disappointed in the leadership of this country. And every senator and congressperson who has voted against gun legislation of any kind is complicit in every shooting in this country. Never thought we’d be living in fear. One day to the next, seems to be a real crap shoot as to whether we will be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the children…..the shooter drills they go through. Omg! I don’t have grand children, but my heart goes out to every parent who sends their kids to school…the fear that they must live with….it’s unimaginable to me.
Do not run away . We need all fighters and reformers to sit together and love each other . This is a war on society and the courage to say NO MORE tools of the devil shall be available to the mentally ill and that the very soul of our nation is not for sale We need to claim our nation for the next generation. We need to love more and value life . I feel that more discussion not less will heal our land. Let us search for the answers with every bit of wisdom we can garner. Cowards hide behind guns. We need to put down the instruments of death and put on the faith of our fathers. They were not perfect but had a purpose to build up not tear down. The murder of others has not been the answer since Cain slew his brother Abel . Why do we as a society not see? It is simple but not easy Keep loving even when it is hard.
I feel that love and values are at the base of mental health issues, Our society certainly has not progressed
claudi
Claudia, thanks for sharing. It echoes so many of your readers thoughts. I’m just numb. I’m sitting outside watching a hummingbird pick aspen cotton from our yard for her nest. Thank goodness today I have a safe spot to just be. I wish everyone did.
I feel all that you expressed. I am so very sad at the violence, the greed, and the stupidity. I think a lot about leaving this country.
P S
Going to stick with your blog the next few days…
One woman on another blogged that murder has been here since beginning and always will be…a little difference when kids have those type of guns and kill many in an instant…going through Covid, war in Eukraine…these shootings…
After living in Minnesota for most of my adult life, I’ve been making due in Texas for the past 8 yrs until my husband retires from the airline industry. It’s been an increasingly surreal experience. Greg Abbot’s and Ted Cruz’s response to yesterday’s tragedy was total hypocrisy. How both men can be “pro-lifers” and supporters of the NRA at the same time is beyond all that is logical and moral. Vote Beto.
Thank you. I live in a town 5 miles from Sandy Hook. I knew one of the children very well and another was my sister’s neighbor. I thought those murders would end this craziness.
I am tired of thoughts and prayers. I am tired of news people calling these events shootings. They are MURDERS!
The song that keeps going through my head is “where have all the flowers gone.” I’m losing hope for our country.
The good news is my husband’s total knee replacement went perfectly and he is doing great.
xo
Betsy
A good many like-minded people echo your feelings and also wish to leave. Is our one-and-only-life to be sacrificed to live in such a corrupt country? We first threatened to leave when Trump won (did he really win?) There’s no remedy because in my State, the Republican governor and legislature sabotaged the census count, then skewed the minority and democrat voting districts (gerrymandered) right out of existence. The State Supreme Court is politically appointed and sided with the Governor. Their actions will last for 10 years until next Census! So yes, I feel powerless and politically doomed. They are devious, cunning, and wicked smart the way they have stacked the deck. My heart goes out to the victims of this power-hungry system.
Ditto….I have nothing to add. My husband still says he wants to leave this country but we cannot either. Elderly parents, 2 children, 1 grandchild keeps us here. We are all on the same page and just try to plug along. My heart is broken😰 Take care my friend💕
In the Bible James 2 says (paraphrased) “faith/love” without works/action is dead”. I you say you love and care for people but don’t do anything about keeping them safe you’re a liar. no count, and worthless to God. All those men sitting around next to the Texas Gov. today made me ill. Beto O’Rourke was the only one with guts. I knew what was coming… nothing about guns, just mental health and more guns in the schools. What teacher wants to have a gun in their desk? unforgivable… They all need to be voted out, but unfortunately too many citizens have one of those same rifles tucked in their back room.
Everyone please contact the NRA about th their annual meeting taking place in Houston ,Texas this weekend. They should be ashamed of themselves for going on with it while these families are dealing with the slaughter of their children. Contact info for this convention is: amresponse@nrahq.org or phone 1-800-672-7632
Please share this info on all your social media accounts!!!!!
This whole situation makes me physically ill.
I am a retired teacher, and my husband still teaches. What in the Dear Lord’s name are those idiots thinking in Texas (and elsewhere)?! They want to arm teachers?!!! That is so unbelievably stupid. School is supposed to be a place for intellectual growth and social development, not a holding area for weapons.
There is even more potential for disaster if you arm the teachers and staff – even with training. There are kids that will think of every way possible to get ahold of those guns.
We have 5 grandchildren and I am scared for them…….and our country.
Claudia, there are a whole lot of us at wit’s end!
They propose everything but the obvious answer: gun control. They are beholden to the NRA.
That children have to grow up with this fear is heartbreaking. That teachers cannot just teach, but have to fear someone coming into their classroom with a gun? Unbelievable.
Stay safe, Susan.
I no longer recognize this country either.
My daughter is a Principal of an elementary and middle school. She with all of the teachers (not the kids) have practice sessions monthly now for an active shooter in the building.
It is beyond sad. It’s horrific madness and I blame all of our politicians. No one is on our side anymore. We, the people are worthless in their eyes. They just want their power and our money!
It is indeed madness. I don’t blame all our politicians. I blame the GOP and the NRA. Democrats have tried to pass control laws for years and Republicans keep blocking them.
Stay safe, Lily.
Thank you,Claudia. You said it all.xo
Thank you Annette.
Stay safe!