When I was in high school in the 60s, we walked out to protest the dress code. The girls wanted their skirts shorter and the boys wanted to wear jeans. This morning the students at Antioch High School in TN returned to school after last week’s shooting only to promptly walk out to protest gun violence. They carried home made signs saying “Ban Guns, Not Books,” “Safety and peace should not be privileges,” and “I want to attend graduation not funerals” …
and they chanted “Not one more” on the street.
I was thinking in the shower – I do some of my best thinking in the shower – what will it take for us as a country to ban assault rifles? We did it once before. What if we could repeal Citizens United? Delete insider trading in Congress? Just get gun money and all the money out of legislators’ hands, abolish the electoral college! Is this a pipe dream? This should be a bipartisan issue; no parent wants their child’s school to turn into a war zone.
They closed the cafeteria at Antioch High School; students that remained in class should be eating lunch in their homerooms today, because the cafeteria is where 16 year old Josselin Corea Escalante was murdered. Would it surprise you to learn that the 17 year old male shooter had extreme-right and antisemitic writings in his social media?
Escalante’s family set up a GoFundMe to help with costs associated with the funeral and with sending her body back to Guatemala. Meanwhile, the owner of Middle Tennessee Caskets donated a casket for Escalante, which was filled with medals of her accomplishments and a pair of soccer cleats.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/antioch-high-school-shooting-tennessee/
A pair of soccer cleats.
What will it take? Maybe if we asked every parent who lost a child to gun violence – inside and outside of school – to donate a pair of their son or daughters’ sneakers and we built an exhibit outside Congress, a see-through monument of footwear, and we installed a rotating camera that streamed live views around the world. It would be like an eagle cam, only this nest would represent death instead of new life.
Pictures of Josselin’s quinceanera are all over her bedroom. Her family fled the violence in Guatemala, only to lose her here, in the middle of the country, in her high school outside of Nashville. Here, where the Bride is planning a Bat Mitzvah this year. Here, where we scrubbed swastikas off a neighbor’s home. Here, where I picked up an hate package on the street in a zip-lock bag telling me which representatives were Jewish.
Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. An emotional King Charles paid a visit to Auschwitz, 80 years after its liberation – 6 Million Jews perished. When I see video on the news of ICE agents rounding up undocumented people, putting them in handcuffs outside their churches and schools, I think of Jews wearing yellow Stars of David and cattle cars. I think of internment camps full of Japanese people who were herded onto buses on the West Coast.
I am not surprised that Elon Musk told a group of right-wing Germans to leave their guilt behind them and ended with a straight-arm salute! Our country has a long history of racist, restrictive immigration policy. The only question I have, is what are we going to do about it?
Here are some high school prom pictures Bob unearthed. We thought we knew everything.
