March 27, Nashville
A reflective moment in Nashville.
Why are you here? Do you enjoy doing this? Why do you keep doing this?
-survivor of Highland Park Illinois mass shooting who was visiting Nashville and attended a press briefing at Covenant Elementary School, March 27
America is losing its youth. America is neglecting its young, its innocents, and correspondingly its future, its peace, its protection, the ineffable.
Somewhere a terrorist is working hard to build a lethal force that will penetrate the walls of a safe room, that like the fifties Castro convertible sofa-bed, can be opened in seconds by a child.
Somewhere a traitor is building a malignant force that will penetrate the shelves of a communal library.
Somewhere a poisoner is creating a virus that will penetrate the stalls of a bathroom, a locker room, a playing field, a team bench, a school bus.
Oh, well, we home school… that’s how we protect our daughters from school shootings.
So offers the legislator from Tennessee. He continues,
Of course, this doesn’t work for everybody… you know, if you have to go to work.
Home school? (1) Why the ‘gentleman from Tennessee’ has just described the new trenches, the ultimate safe room. Let’s pause and expand on his idea: a nation of home education, home religion, home health care. Because that’s where the latent violence lurks — where innocents teach each other, worship with each other and care for each other.
Better put on the body armor.
We’re leaving home.
The survivor and her son from Highland Park, the site of a July 4, 2022 mass shooting were visiting friends in Nashville, Tennessee on March 27, 2023.
She grabbed the media moment to ask, does this make you feel better? You must like doing this because you keep reporting this.
It has been said that the paradox of solidarity is visiting the situations that make one feel powerless.
Walls, trenches and body armor can’t penetrate solidarity.
March 30
Notes
1-Jessica Winter in a March 28 essay in The New Yorker makes the claim that the threat of gun incidents occurring in the home is greater than in the school, so support statistics on gun shot inflicted incidents resulting in fatal wounds.
After the Nashville School Shooting, a Faithless Remedy for Gun Violence | The New Yorker
