Republicans Care About Embryos when they Should Care About Children
by Valerie Morales
Hours after nineteen children and two adults lay in their own fetid blood, and hours after an 18-year-old perished, shot dead by a Border Patrol agent, night fell across Texas. For the unlucky, it was a quiet night of diminished capacity and broken hearts. Retraumatization grief and empathy grief and shock and confusion ruined every single second of every single hour.
Uvalde is a quiet place more than eighty miles from San Antonio. It was once known as the honey capital of the world (by the World’s Fair of 1900 when Uvalde honey won the top prize). Uvalde is home to Texas’ first opera house and many who live there are financially marginalized. Grandparents, parents, and children shape a small community of gentle and hard-working people who love each other and who dote on their children.
Far from Uvalde on the night of the murders, I found myself overwhelmed. I had prepared for the gooey ending of This Is Us, the show's last episode (not so gooey after all). But the death of nineteen children and two adults preempted my intentions. Needing a break, I went to buy milk for a chocolate milkshake and behind me in line was a couple. The woman asked her male companion why was it that the citizenry of Texas was so fannishly passionate about dead embryos but grotesquely silent when kids die at school. Her companion searched for logic. “Don’t you know we hate children after they are born?”
While children matter to their parents and to their communities, I am finding little evidence that they matter to their country and to those in their country whose responsibility it is to make them safe, particularly Senate Republicans who understand the fine print, that children, living or not, are unable to shine a light on the depravity of gun violence. And so then, neither will they. What happens every time something like this shakes our core beliefs in justice is emotional damage. A preventable tragedy diminishes all of our romantic mythology about the American dream. It makes that dream feel like a joke particularly when Republican leadership fetishizes guns because in the back of their brains is some foolishness about a possible race war or immigrants taking over. So arm yourselves.
In times like these, our collective outrage and shame are like a kite on a day when the wind whips it around. Sure, it floats in the sky for days and days over hills and valleys but then in quieter air, the kite just drifts away over the ocean, unseen, forgotten, a footnote. In a matter of weeks, all that happened yesterday will be transformed because we have been groomed to reinvent the unthinkable, to leave the trauma to the parents, and then go about living as if nothing disturbing just happened. We lose our language as we recast what we know happened into what we can bear to tell ourselves about what happened. We lose our words because those who are more powerful and richer than us have lost their morality and their courage. We don’t hold leadership accountable with the same sort of traumatic outcry we exhibit the day of the horrible murders. We forget our anger. We put it down. We lay it to sleep. Gun advocates know this and depend on our drifting attention and loyalties.
It’s why there really wasn’t a response after Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy was powerfully poignant when he asked his colleagues “Why are we here?”
It’s simple. They are there to subscribe to a system that allows the NRA to pay their freight, and when paranoid racists remind them of who they need to be loyal to they have no guts. These sorts of congressmen and congresswomen are wildly simplistic. They can be sycophants, hypocrites, and commodities. Some are racists. Others are not. Some hate women. Others are champions. Most, if not all, care about safety as long as we are not talking about guns, black women, and rape.
After 9–11, politicians created the TSA and began a system of security checkpoints in order to avoid another terrorist attack. They cosigned on airbags once the evidence stated it saved lives. They are in accord on traffic checkpoints over holidays when drinking and driving create a death trap. They warn about blizzards and hurricanes and tornadoes and rising rivers. They research and regulate and test prescription drugs and when white people become addicted they work until hell freezes over to save them. Children cannot buy beer at 15, and heroin at 16. Babies are vaccinated. There are hundreds and hundreds of safety regulations to protect citizens. The same men and women who are unbothered by 18-year-olds buying assault rifles have strapped face masks around their ears during the worst of the pandemic and were shot up with the COVID vaccine. They don’t want to die. They just don’t care if we do.
The gang of 50 [senators] who take a grotesque amount of money from the NRA and approve the sale of guns and assault rifles to just about anyone aren’t affected by the murder of children or the murder of Asian sex workers or the murder of black elderly shoppers as they enter into a Faustian bargain the same way they chew gum. They expect the gun-toting 18-year-old will hurt himself. But when he slaughters others they duck and hide.
We know the senators' names and careers, their obfuscations, their moral relativism deflection. Where once upon a time they used to address their constituents directly because they actually cared about them there has been a pendulum swift. They cannot make us feel safe, not anymore. They refuse to protect us and it is a holy mess.
A recurring theme is how those who have the most power and the most wealth and the most access are doing the least for children who are vulnerable, bright, happy, well-loved, and now murdered. How long does it take GOP politicians to wash the blood from their hands?
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It was an ordinary day in 2021 when Jemaris Jarmel Leek Jr. was killed. The Lansing, Michigan teenager was 17 when he died after being shot several times. In Rock Hill, South Carolina Omarian Small, 16, was sitting in his car when he was approached by two suspects who fired at him and his passenger. Omarian was killed. His passenger had minor injuries. While riding in a 1973 Buick Electra, all white in color including the rims, the bright and engaging nephew of my neighbor was gunned down on a Saturday night in Los Angeles and the killer has never been found. Bijan Shoushtari was 18 and his mother Marsha wants answers. In Omaha, Nebraska Blake Miller was showing his friend and baseball teammate the family gun, a .22 rifle, and the gun went off mortally wounding Tanner Farrell. Both boys were 18.
We hear about these isolated stories of gun violence as they pile up week after week after week and numbness sets in about kids and violence particularly when the victims are children you do not know as if anonymity invalidates the experience of murder.
The facts are disturbing. In 2020, 4,300 firearm deaths killed children. While suicides contributed to the overall number, homicides were the majority according to the Center for Disease Control. More children now die from gun homicide than cancer and auto accidents.
In 2020, there was a 33.4% increase in gun-homicide deaths of children and a 1.1% increase in suicide deaths of children. The pandemic was good for the gun business and to make it even more perverse school shootings are Xmas to gun dealers; everyone suddenly wants to buy more guns. Gun culture is a thing but so then is marijuana culture and we have figured out how to make pot legal but regulated.
The collateral damage of what we have not done runs deep. Once-happy families must now manage absence. Milestones such as summer vacations, swimming parties, graduations and proms, college dorms, and first “real” jobs, and weddings are replaced by coffin selections and raising money and sitting through homilies and eulogies while wanting to scream to the Gods: screw your thoughts and prayers. Bring my baby back.
A new group of Americans will never have peace. Or, hope. And justice. They will never have the innate assurance that their country cares about them, that its Republican leaders have a shred of empathy or decency. What those leaders care about is their jobs, and not having their names on the record as enablers. What they care about is abortion restrictions and controlling women’s bodies, forcing incest victims and rape victims to carry babies born out of violence and toxic rage, the same kind of rage that causes young men to terrorize and murder children.
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Annie Robb was a Uvalde educator who loved children, the public library, and the opera. When she died in the 1950s she left a gift to the school children she loved dearly and in turn, they named the elementary school after her in 1956. Robb Elementary educates second, third, and fourth-graders. Needless to say, what happened on May 24th was too unimaginable to contemplate happening in Uvalde, Texas, much less at Annie Robb’s precious school.
In the classroom, that morning Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia put their bodies in front of students as a shield. Mireles daughter Adalynn Ruiz wrote on Facebook “I want everything back. My heart will be forever broken.” Mireles co-teacher Irma Garcia was a 23-year veteran teacher who was a finalist for the Trinity Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her nephew wrote about the mother of four, “My Tia did not make it, she sacrificed herself protecting the kids in her classroom.”
Before the moment that changed 10-year-old Amerie Jo Garza’s life, she’d received a certificate for making the honor roll. When the gunman threatened to kill all the students she called 911 before she was slain.
Lexi Rubio made the All-A honor roll and the good citizen award. Her parents said she was kind and sweet and loved life and playing sports. “Please let the world know we miss our baby.”
There’s so much more to be written. Beautiful stories. Poetic lives. Tender remembrances. 21 beautiful lives should be anticipating the end of 4th grade on Thursday. But their families have established GoFundMe’s and are planning funerals as they walk in both shock and anger. This did not have to happen.
Steve Kerr whose father was murdered by terrorists in Lebanon when he was a teenager and who also is the coach of the Golden State Warriors professional basketball team echoed the sentiments of many when he screamed “We can’t get numb to this. We can’t just sit here and read about it and go well, let’s have a moment of silence…We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it [universal background checks] to a vote despite what we the American people want. They won’t vote on it because they want to hold on to their own power. It’s pathetic.”
Kerr was chilling and it wasn’t because he pounded on the table in frustration and the sound that echoed was the sound of our collective beating hearts in overdrive. Watching community after community bury the dead is exhausting and tiring and painful and traumatizing. Most of us don’t have the capacity to pull the blinds and look away. But, as Kerr reminded us, we are here because men and women in the Senate are fine with dead 4th graders. Or dead black elderly. Or dead Asian parishioners. Or dead….fill in the blank.
It took a war to change slavery. It took child labor laws to change workplace oppression. It took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to end Jim Crow segregation. It took Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to end employment discrimination based on sex, race, color, religion, or national origin. It took Roe v. Wade to hand women control over their bodies. It took Title IX to end sex-based discrimination in educational programs that receive funding from the federal government. It took Emmett Till’s beaten face on Jet magazine to trigger Rosa Parks into not changing her seat. It took the towers falling on 9–11 to create terrorism laws. It took Medicare and Medicaid to protect the health of the poor and the elderly. It took the Clean Air Act Amendments to set standards and clean up the environment.
We can save children instead of burying them if we’re passionate enough about voting all the Republican enablers with blood on their hands out of office. If we make gun violence our line in the sand the way Lincoln made slavery his. If we accept it takes one village after another village after another village not to just raise a child but to save one. We can do something transactional and Herculean in honor of the children who have lost their lives and in support of their parents who are in active grief while Republican politicians are trapped in thoughts and prayers.
