So, I just watched the episode of Glee where there is a school shooter. Or – well, an accidental shooting but of course, the school goes on lockdown and the actors go through the motions.
And I found myself sobbing right along with them.
Our bodies have a natural self-defense system. Our Amygdala sends a message to our pituitary gland and adrenal glands saying, “This is an emergency, give me adrenaline and give me cortisol.”
Our bodies are instantly flooded with these stress hormones and we enter fight or flight.
Now imagine if you were in a high school classroom with twenty other students and suddenly shots ring out down the hallway. The teacher dives for the door, locks it, turns off the lights and lines you along with your classmates up against the wall.
Right now, your body is flooded with these stress response hormones and you’re being told to sit and be very quiet while you hear gunshots and screaming echoing down the hall.
You know, in your head, that people are dying. You know, in your head, that the shooter is not very far from you and there is nowhere to go and nothing to do but for you to sit and wait your turn.
Those kinds of stressors are hard enough for an adult on a battlefield let alone for a teenager who’s just starting life. Who’s biggest concern five minutes earlier was over the test they took in their last class.
Now, imagine you’re a middle school student.
Are you done?
Now, imagine your six.
We drill for this now in schools like we drill tornado warnings and fire alarms. We drill for active shooters.
This is our new normal thanks to Columbine and thanks to Newtown Connecticut among others.
We will try and regulate the hell out of a woman’s reproductive rights (not really, we’re just trying to punish women for having sex), we’ll take ‘stands’ against gay marriage for moral reasons, we’ll even cry over a New Disney film.
We claim morality in these cases – but at the end of the day, it’s a gaslit morality. It’s completely fake.
However, there is something morally dead about a society that will not try and regulate guns and keep them out of the hands of the mentally ill or require background checks.
And of course this all will descend into conversations of mental health and the beloved 2nd Amendment – but this is always where the conversation stops.
I watched this show – and I know it’s just a show – but the idea of my kid or any kid sitting on top of a toilet seat in a stall in a bathroom because that’s where she was caught when the shooting started – terrified for her life, or the idea of a child saying goodbye via text or ‘these are my last words’ videos on a cellphone makes me sick to my stomach and I don’t even have kids.
Going after marriage rights or reproductive rights is already soulless. Taking away people’s automomy is the act of a tyrant. I just never thought our country would sink so low, that in our quest for Liberty or Death – we’d had our children the “Or Death” part of the equation because we’re too fascinated with the wet dream of killing our own government.
You know, just to throw this out there, 9/10ths of the laws we encounter on a day to day basis is not Federal Law. It’s state law.
And as far as I am concerned it’s been the states in the past eight years or so sweeping away people’s rights by so-called moral members of society – when they’re not too busy fucking male prostitutes in motel rooms.
So- at the end of the day the question is this – if the federal government’s role is to protect all of its citizens, why can’t it protect us from the states and it’s people?