Wednesday’s school shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis is every parent’s worst nightmare.
It’s our greatest fear, the thing that keeps us up at night, what we push out of our heads as we drop our kids off at school each morning.
As a child, you understand that your parents will die. It’s awful, but you spend most of your life preparing for it to happen. As painful as it will be, it makes sense that someday the people who brought you into this world will leave it.
It’s not supposed to work the other way around. Parents aren’t supposed to bury their children. Here in our small community, we know the trauma it causes. Confusing their name with someone else’s. Seeing them in every family photo, and not in those to come. An empty chair.
That we continue to lose our children to gun violence and do nothing about it — it is such cruel insanity.
School shootings are now a reality of parenting in the United States today. That’s not true in most of the world. This is a uniquely American crisis, both in scale and in intractability.
We have the data. Tons of it. There are solutions that most Americans agree on. Yet here we are. Another school year begins, and two children die. They were praying.
Those who survived are also victims. They will live with this.
I completely understand the instinct parents have these days to shelter and protect their children as much as possible. Tragedy is now a steady background noise.
The joy of exploring a big, beautiful world? We’ll settle for just keeping our kids alive.
It’s enough to break your heart. It’s breaking us right now.
