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On The Murder of Children



There is a certain quality to horror which is disorienting, like a sudden breaking of faith. The ice drops from beneath you, the yellow light is stale; and no matter how hard you look, dad’s face is not in the churning crowd.


Horror is an instant, a change which has gathered without you noticing. After it's recognized it's too late, and you must run away, except it's too fast, and you realize you are lost in something infinite, something insensitive to your faith that things will be ok.


Yesterday, a man named Adolpho Hernandez realized there had been a shooting at his nephew’s elementary school. After hours of anxious waiting they were reunited and his nephew told him what he saw.


“He actually witnessed his little friend get shot in the face,” Mr. Hernandez said. The friend, he said, “got shot in the nose and he just went down, and my nephew was devastated.”


We use clipped language to describe when children are murdered in America, simple words to capture that which is incomprehensible. It's a little friend who was shot in the nose. The words are elemental like those which describe what we’ve always feared: night, fire, sea, God.


Horror is enveloping, like death is, a foretaste of death, a sip of something you don’t want, never wanted, but know you must someday drink, and drink in full. Thankfully you have ways of forgetting this. Netflix, Porn Hub, Soul Cycle, vacation, retirement. And there is a natural order. You are in a line. Your children—those whom you love most—will drink it long after you are gone. And you are comforted by this.


Unless they don’t. Unless they are taken out of line and put in the spot in front of yours and you must watch as they are shot in the nose and just go down.


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When Salvador Ramos entered Robb elementary with the machine guns he would use to murder 19 children and 2 adults, the school went into lockdown. This involved the turning off of lights, the hiding of children under desks, and the frantic locking of doors.


At Robb, presumably for safety, the doors are double locked. They require a key inside and out. So, to lockdown the school, a janitor was needed to secure each door by hand. As the shooter entered Robb, the janitor frantically locked successive doors, rushing down the hall, and so protected scores of little souls as he fumbled with keys, shuffling from door to door.


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Our nation’s divisions are seen most clearly when children are murdered. We want to protect our most precious possessions. And since we are not the brave janitor, and we have no keys, we must turn to our closely held ideas which are clumsy and ill fit for the lock.


The right gropes for a key of return to a time when children were not murdered in elementary schools. The problem is not guns. The problem is the state of the people who wield them. We need an ideological return to a time when people knew right from wrong, loved their neighbor, raised their children correctly.


But the quality of the people who wield guns is unavoidably a matter of perspective. When were children not murdered in America? How many African children died during the Middle Passage, or after they were sold on the beaches of Charleston Bay? How many Cherokee children died during the Jackson offensives or on the forced march of the Trail of Tears? How many black children were killed, or simply watched as their father’s were hung from trees and their entrails played with by dogs?


But the left gropes for a key of progress, citing the advance of civil rights and scientific development as proof of purchase on a future where children will no longer be murdered in classrooms. We must continue to innovate, continue to legislate, using the power of our success and the effectiveness of our system to protect the most vulnerable.


But the story of progress is a wax nose. Whose values orient the direction of our progress? Which morality is that which our advancement serves? And what about when we get it wrong? Eugenics; the utilitarian policies killing untold numbers of industrial age children; the League of Nations—a grand edifice of liberalism—broke the world with good intentions, setting it up for WW2. There is a straight line to be drawn from liberal idealism to Nagasaki; sympathetic social programs and the mass abortion of millions of children.


America is soaked in the blood of innocents and nothing like nostalgia for the past, nor optimism for the future, will save them. There is something wrong with us. And the right and left fail by offering solutions they do not possess.


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Imagine you lived in Uvalde, Texas. And yesterday your child was shot in the nose in front of his classmates. And you now sit in your living room and you want to die or kill someone yourself. And you can’t go on and nothing anyone can say will bring your child back. You need wisdom badly. You need time. You need a family to help you cope for the rest of your life until you too will die, hopefully with some kind of closure, which you now feel is impossible to achieve.


Now, imagine a presidential candidate of the last ten years walking into your living room and sitting next to you. Or better yet, one of their primary opponents that you voted for. Would these fools have anything to say worth hearing? Could they breathe life into you or give you any kind of assurance that they can, in fact, stop this from happening again?


I have no faith that they could. And I have no faith in the ideologies they espouse or the platforms they promote. If the children in Uvalde died for anything, I hope they died to show us that America is not suited to protect them. It’s the janitor, literally their only hope, shoes squeaking against the floor he’d just polished, keys music lightly percussed by the execution of babies down the hall.


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Here’s one lie that will ensure this happens over and over again. Believe, with all your heart, that our politicians are not a reflection of you. Believe that outrage, not virtue, offense, not wisdom, is your responsibility. Blame or embrace a system to which you are a victim. Because it is a decadent society which elects corrupt politicians. Because it is a childish electorate which appoints impotent legislators.


The writer Annie Dillard said, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Look at our society. We spend our lives buying plastic objects, getting in Twitter feuds, ignoring our families, aborting our children, drinking too much, eating too much—we are a useless people. And when tragedy strikes, we must only know it as a function of our uselessness.


Jesus was once asked why a local tower had fallen and killed innocent people. The questioner wanted to know if it was because of their sin that they had died. Jesus rebuked the questioner and said that death was an opportunity for repentance—not the effect of some moral cause. He focused the questioner's attention back onto himself and not the system which would interpret the tragedy on his behalf.


Let the death of the innocent remind you of your own death and so live to protect the innocents we have left. We must learn to live and die better; to face both with courage. To become individually the kind of community we wish to see remade.


That is until we follow the Uvalde children into death; when space is collapsed, and the curtain is pulled away, and we must deal with heaven and earth in an instant.


1 Comment


Phillip Aasen
Phillip Aasen
May 26, 2022

Hard words for hard times. May I, and many, heed them.

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