It's the helplessness that haunts a parent during school shooting alerts
Our moves and overall power here are so limited.
Most human beings will go through life without ever being able to understand the experience of doing certain things, even the darkest of things. The action of shooting a gun at another person for example. Things we become immediately squeamish about are ordinary thoughts and actions for others, which is why school shootings are so damn frequent.
For instance, I will never understand the singular urge to pick up a weapon, enter a school designed to enrich the souls of the future, and open fire. Since Columbine High School became the ground zero for school shootings back in 1999, this has become a normal task for individuals who are too young to die or operate a firearm.
That's the world we're growing up in, folks, and it’s gotten very close. The school shooting this morning was the first to strike St. Louis. One that's a little too close to my son's school and our neighborhood in south city. It was The Collegiate of Medicine and Bioscience/Central Performing Visual Arts school off Kingshighway and Arsenal became the epicenter for bloody chaos Monday morning. Three dead and seven injured. Two of those are headed to a hospital. All of this taking place within two miles of my son Vinny's school.
Sooner or later, it'll be happening close to all of us, the people who will only pick up a gun for good causes, if at all. My reaction is the same as the last one, and it's similar to what Morgan Freeman's character in "Seven" said, quoting Hemingway: "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I believe in the second part."
There are some great reporters, TV anchors, and various media members doing fine work on the ground at the moment, and I'll let you flock to their channels to read their reports. As of noon, there were seven wounded and three dead. The police didn't wait long before pushing through into the school, and taking the assailant out. But there's so much more to read here. The texts from a student to her, asking to be picked up due to the shooting and another questioning how something this awful can keep happening.
That last part is the billion dollar question at the moment, one that may not get answered in my lifetime. Our world is slowly swallowing itself whole, one horrible incident at a time. The government shows little rush in fixing these issues. It's too easy to count money or look past it. When these things become routine, it's a problem. Receiving a text from a friend that a south city St. Louis school was under fire isn't the ideal way to start my Monday, but this fucked-up world has no intention of answering our thoughts and ending the madness.
It's the reason I take a couple extra seconds as my kid walks around the corner and into school every time I drop him off in the morning. A long enough glance to immediately check the road in front of you afterwards. The feeling of helplessness is what makes this all so hard to digest. It’s repeatable and exhausting. A parent can do absolutely nothing to stop this, outside of homeschooling their kid--even if that has a huge effect on their growth and the family's overall stability. Our moves here are limited to the point of being a bystander to potential danger.
I wouldn't like to think about it, but the common aspect of these shootings make it hard to ignore. I’d like to think our brain is part of a brain of networks, and they communicate all the bad shit happening around the world into our wavelength. This happens regardless of whether we like it or not. All of this is part of the mind’s plan to intercept our weakest links and inflate them for our personal disgust.
It's the helplessness that keeps it close to mind. The alert you don’t want to receive. Our school sends out emails about everything, from a new club to a new protocol. Social media is where people find out horrible things these days and that’s a good reason to hate it, but every email from Gateway Science Academy gives me pause. Imagine finding out via email that your son or daughter is in current and immediate danger.
Everybody gets depressed and down after reading about a school shooting. This latest one was less than ten minutes from my kid’s school. It’s starting to feel like every time one of these happens, I think of it as my son surviving no matter how far away he is. That’s what a parent’s mind will do to them.
Helpless and waiting for the day where life pisses in our cereal for real. This crime statistic isn’t a St. Louis thing, or at least it didn’t use to be.