It’s hard to avoid the conversations going on in my school district office today, or to look away from the worried eyes of my co-workers as they stare at their computers reading the news.
Anxious, muffled conversations are taking place among the mothers in our staff in the hallway, some with kids the ages of those kids at Sandy Hook School in Connecticut, others with kids fully grown and away at school far from home, growing into their adulthood. It’s more than heartache everyone feels. It’s shock. Our hearts have been vacuumed clean out.
We’re trying to reassure ourselves past the grief-numbness we feel with the reassurance that It can’t happen here. ‘Thank God my child is safe’. That’s the mantra.
It’s predictable as the programming you’ll get on the news channels after any act of gun-related violence in America, which is actually an inoculation against reality. The drug in that inoculation is the reassurance that it will never happen to you, or anyone you love. And these are probably going to be the words that will be shared amongst many of these same mothers in the hallway by early next week.
That’s how this will be played out. I predict within a discreet waiting period of roughly 24 hours, an attractive blond spokeswoman from the National Rifle Association will issue a statement: “There are already enough laws, tests and screenings in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And even though this is a horrible, senseless tragedy…blah-blah-blah…we of the NRA who are also mothers, fathers, parents of children in schools…blah-blah-blah…we must uphold our Second Amendment rights…blah-blah-blah.” And onward we go until the next disaster news bubble.