I want them to come and see

In response to the Covenant Christian School Murders March 27,2023

Every politician and pundit. Every person offering only “thoughts and prayers,” every person posting what a horrible thing this is and how they couldn’t imagine something like this ever happening and there is just nothing we can do about it. Every newscaster normalizing these tragedies by sandwiching them between sports scores and stock market reports. Every person who demands that their personal right to assemble an endless arsenal outweigh the needs of our children’s right to have a greater chance to live in a … well, just to live. Every person thinking this can be solved with just more legislation or more metal detectors, or more active shooter drills. 

I want them to come and see. 

I want them to stand in the hospital waiting room while the unimaginable, the ultimate nightmare of every parent, is made terrifyingly real in the choking words of the ER team who gives the news: “I’m so sorry ...”

I want them to see this couple crumple in a grief so violent they throw up and pass out. 

I want them to listen to the phone calls made to grandparents and cousins, godparents, aunts and uncles. I want them to hear the uncontrolled shrieks and wails and sobs in response. 

I want them to attend the first practice of the basketball team whose remaining players, some of her closest friends, will have to somehow continue without her. The first soccer game where everyone there watches in numb disbelief that he isn’t there and that the world can even continue on. 

I want them to return for every anniversary, every time there’s a graduation, or wedding, or holiday, or birthday that is so incomplete, so incomprehensible without that person you miss so desperately that the thought of them makes you nauseous, doing whatever it takes just to endure them. Year, after year, after year, after year, after …

I want them to experience the classroom where the teacher will have to help make some kind of sense to her students why they should continue to come to school and learn with the malignant threat hanging over their heads that they could be next. I want them to personally know, by name, those same teachers who are tortured for the rest of their lives thinking “If only I could have ...”

I want them to watch as the parents of the classmates and friends who survived try and cope with the very real, very constant existential fear that their kids will be next. 

I want them to sit in the sanctuary while a pastor struggles to give an answer to why God seems so distant, so helpless to so much suffering, who feels so utterly helpless.  

I want them to go with the family to the funeral home and help pick out a child-sized casket and kid-appropriate flowers. I want them to watch as those same parents try to pick out clothes for their child’s brothers and sisters who survived and try to help explain what is happening in language they might possibly understand. 

I want them to be present when the authorities return their bullet-riddled and blood-soaked backpack, the one they helped pack and made sure their child wouldn't forget the very last time they saw them. 

I want them to witness as that little girl's father hugs her pillow against his chest desperately praying the scent from where she last laid her head will never fade. 

I want them to wait until years later and then watch as the little boy’s mom finally finds the courage to go through his closet and lovingly take each piece of clothing, each pair of shoes and box them up to take to GoodWill. I want them to see the never-to-be unwrapped presents stored in the back of the closet. 

I want them to observe the therapist's office and watch as he tries to help a despondent, numb, angry, confused child gain some semblance of an ability to be alive in a culture where such violence and terror has become mundane, expected. 

I want them to walk with the police and first responders as they uncontrollably shake in the hours after rushing to the scene, incapable of stopping the images of carnage from playing over and over and over in their heads. 

I want them to live everyday in a real community that struggles with the ongoing trauma of such terror. 

I want them to join a table of survivors, forty years later, still dealing with the stench of death, the sounds of the screams and the devastation of trauma. 

I want the whole damn world to stand still, stop what we are doing and listen to the wailing, then the silence, the insufferable silence.

You say these kinds of tragedies can’t be avoided? That all we can offer is “thoughts and prayers,” that these slaughters are an unimaginable aberration and there is just nothing we can do about it? You demur about having to report on it as just another story? You insist your inalienable right to own however many of whatever kind of firearm with zero restrictions outweighs the needs of our children’s right to have a greater chance to survive a school day and live to make their Saturday basketball game? You demand this can be solved with just more legislation or more metal detectors, more active shooter drills? 

I say stop, don’t look away, pay attention and listen to the lament.