About 17 miles north of where I sat in my office, and about a year before I became a mother, an eight year old boy was murdered in his classroom by a deranged woman with a gun. The town was Winnetka, Illinois and the boy's name was Nick Corwin. Winnetka might ring a bell for some, if only because it is the picturesque upscale suburb that gave us the Home Alone mansion. Nick Corwin might not ring a bell for anybody.
The shooting at the Hubbard Woods School, and the less deadly but nevertheless extraordinary terror that ensued in the neighborhood as the killer continued her fateful spree, shook me to my core. Not as a future suburbanite who believed suburbs were safe. Not as a future mother who knew that the loss of a child under any circumstance is horrific, under this circumstance, incomprehensible. Simply as a human being who could not fathom the depths to which someone must sink to commit such an atrocity.
Fast forward to April 2023. Not a week after three children and three adults were slaughtered in a Nashville school, and we seem to have forgotten. Instead, anyone masochistic enough to flip on the news at any hour of the day yesterday was treated to endless coverage of an airplane emblazoned with the gag-inducing name of the vile life-long criminal/ex-president, sitting first on one tarmac then another. The equivalent of watching ugly paint dry. The odious person himself waving like a movie star to, well, nobody in particular as he strutted his grotesque self into his Manhattan home.
While we were watching, all over Tennessee, students of all ages were rising up. And, while students rose up, Republicans in the state legislature plunged beneath rock bottom, stripping Democrats from committees for having the audacity to joint the protests, still steadfastly refusing to enact any sort of common-sense gun reform.
While we were watching, the fascistic governor of Florida, the much-touted "sane" alternative for 2024 -- you know, the one who is not only (horrors) picking fights with Disney but also banning books and stripping rights from women and anybody who isn't an avowed heterosexual and repeating anti-Semitic tropes with abandon -- signed into law a bill that lets people carry guns without a permit and without any training. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but wasn't there a mass school shooting in Florida only a few years ago?
Ah well, who cares. Back to the plane, boss. De plane.
The way things look, my grandchildren will be born into a world of active shooter drills and back-alley abortions and hate directed against anybody who isn't a White Christian nationalist. And wall-to-wall news coverage of a big plane and viewer polls about whether a life-long criminal who capitalized on everything that's wrong with our world to try to hijack our country should be indicted. Since when do we defer to polls to decide these things -- and by the way, who actually answers calls from pollsters?
I don't mean to sound so angry. Well I suppose I do. I'm angry and I'm scared. Kudos to the young people in Tennessee for waking up and rising up. Hopefully, the rest of us won't have to wait for a shooter to appear in our midst to avert our eyes from the plane.
