Not a Listicle

Full disclosure, this is my third crack at an essay this week. I’m struggling because it’s the holidays, and it’s the end of the year, and I wanted to send you something … hopeful? I didn’t want to send you an essay full of rage and despair — after all, you can just look at the news. I wanted to send you a look back, or a look forward with some kind of useful insight. Something less morose than one year down, three more to go.

I refuse to mark time by the cruelty of this administration. Time is precious. I don’t count the years away, I don’t even count down the hours. I wish we didn’t have to think about these soulless people or talk about them or worry about what horrible thing might come next, but there’s so much suffering. I try to find the balance, to point my compass toward all the beauty, but sometimes the world tilts toward the unthinkable.

I have to remind myself we’ve made it through almost a year of this insanity and look at us. Maybe it’s hard on many days (it is hard), maybe we’re a little worse for the wear, but we have each other. We know who our friends are now, who the safe people are, where it’s okay to cry. We’ve made a lot of art — no one will ever have to wonder how we felt living through this time. We have our gallows humor.

We got out in the streets, we made phone calls and signs or wrote emails and letters or boycotted corporations and canceled subscriptions, or all of the above. I wrote the angriest missive of my life to a judge in Arkansas — I thought it might spontaneously combust on the way there. We’ve dealt with the National Guard in our cities. We showed up to fight back in flower crowns and blow-up frog costumes.

We’ve done our best to protect our neighbors, our daughters, our sisters, our mothers and our friends, and we will keep doing our best.

They. Will. Not. Win.

There are too many infuriated perimenopausal Gen Xers in the mix.

I’m full of rage and despair at the moment, which makes it challenging to write something end-of-the-year inspirational. I know better than to force cheer, or any other emotion. I grew up that way — just put on a happy face and make things look good on the outside even if I was dying on the inside, falalalala.

After I abandoned the second essay I thought, maybe this is the moment to write my first-ever listicle. I could play with the 12 days of Christmas, not that everyone is Christian. I know, right!? Some people celebrate Hanukkah, like the families at Bondi Beach. I saw an interview with a mother who jumped into a pit with a bunch of other families. They were all trying to shield their children with their bodies. She said she tried to make sure she had covered her daughter’s entire five-year-old body with her own, and then she used her legs to cover other people’s children as much as she could.

She was there for fifteen minutes, heart pounding, wondering if this was the end, whether her daughter was going to have to crawl out from underneath her lifeless body. If you care about anything other than the fact that this was a mother wondering these things about her five-year-old daughter, I don’t know what to say except you’re missing my point entirely.

Maybe it will help if I point out that a Muslim man — Ahmed al-Ahmed — stopped one of the shooters. He was a good guy without a gun. There were a lot of people who risked their own lives to try to save others. Sofia and Boris Gurman also tried to wrestle a gun away from one of the shooters, but they lost their lives in the process. They were Jewish if that matters to you, a couple who would have celebrated thirty-five years of marriage in January. They were the first two people killed in the attack.

I think I have to accept there will be no listicle. I don’t know what to do with all the violence and hatred anymore, but I know it’s killing us. I read an article about how our phones are killing us — and probably — but not like guns and hate and racism and bigotry. It was more like, don’t start and end your day with your phone, and also don’t scroll all day. I don’t know everything, but I know we weren’t put here on this beautiful planet with all the mountains and rivers and trees and stars in the sky — to stare at a glowing rectangle in our hands.

The phones are probably killing our spirit, our creativity, and our critical thinking skills. The bullets are killing our children. Also the bombs. I might have mentioned I don’t care whose children. Wherever children are dying because of guns and bombs, adults are failing. Lots of adults are failing. Most of the failing adults have decided money and power are more important than kindness and compassion. They think empathy is for suckers.

The Reiners had empathy, though. They wanted the world to be better for everyone’s children. They thought wealthy people should be taxed more, and they were wealthy. They believed love is love. They didn’t just believe these things, they fought for them.

Sandy Hook always hits me hard. My son is the same age the Sandy Hook kids would have been. It makes me feel sick to write the words, would have been. The year it happened, everything was a reminder. I opened my closet door one morning — about a week before Christmas — and saw the wrapped gifts for my kids I had tucked all the way in the back. Then I couldn’t breathe because I realized there were closets in Connecticut with gifts hidden and wrapped that would never be opened.

If it was too painful to be inside my own skin, how must those parents feel?

A set of missing little feet padding down their hallways. Siblings trying to make sense of a loss like that, when grown adults couldn’t even do it. Correction: can’t. Can’t even do it. Because it doesn’t make sense, and it’s still happening. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents — not getting to say goodbye to a person they loved so big there aren’t the right words to do it justice, so they just have to hope their love was enough in the end. That it was some measure of comfort, something to hold onto.

The agony of knowing your child was scared in their last moments and you weren’t there to comfort them? How do you live with that, and why should you have to?

I can’t even write this now without crying. What are we doing?

I felt so sure we’d do something when Sandy Hook happened.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I don’t know how any of us can bear to have school age children in this country anymore. Both of my kids have been in active shooter lockdowns. When it happened with my son, I was at IKEA, buying furniture for the assisted living apartment where I was moving my dad. I sank down on a couch in the showroom with my heart in my throat and I texted with my son while I tried to get information about what was happening on the parent fb page for his high school. On the local police department page. Whether it was real. I lost my peripheral vision, but tried to seem calm in my texts to give him a lifeline, and myself, too. My kids are my whole heart.

When it happened with my daughter a couple of years later, I was around the corner and I ran toward her school, a thing I was not supposed to do. I was supposed to stay home and wait, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m sitting in my house around the corner while my child is terrified half a block away. If it was anything like Uvalde I wasn’t going to stand around. Maybe the good guys with guns would be too chickenshit to do anything, but not moms.

The SWAT team was crawling all over campus, though. I stood by an exit that wasn’t being guarded by too many police. The officers there took pity on me and didn’t make me leave, or they realized I couldn’t or wouldn’t. I texted and asked my daughter exactly where she was, which building, which floor, which room. I told her to look for the EXITS just in case. JUST IN CASE. Just in case I had to tell her to run.

I would have told her to run as fast as she could in a zig zag line, a thing I know because I read it somewhere. A person running in a zig zag line is harder to shoot. I didn’t text that part. This is not a normal way to live.

I read a lot of articles this year about how great it is that we’re banning cellphones in schools now, and I’m sorry to say I read a lot of self-righteous, self-congratulatory comments underneath. Get back to me after your kid has been in a lockdown, which I do not wish on anyone, ever. I cannot even wish it on the bastards who offer nothing but thoughts and prayers when we have school shootings — because their kids are innocent. Their children deserve to be safe and nurtured and cared for at school. I know that, even if their own parents do not.

This is coming from someone who read to her kids for hours each night. It was my joy. I miss those nights, they will go down as some of the best nights of my life. If there’s anything better than your kids’ arms and legs slung over you while you read good sentences to them, I don’t know what it is. Their little faces, their sighs, their huge eyes rapt with attention.

Until we ban assault weapons, cellphones should be in backpacks at school, silenced. I love teachers, we don’t pay them enough, we don’t acknowledge them enough. There are certain teachers who saved my life along the way. Phones should not come out during classes ever — unless there’s an emergency. Even then they stay on silent mode, and sadly these are things you need to teach your kids, just like you need to teach them internet safety in other ways. You don’t want the text sounds or ringer to give their location away, to draw attention to them.

I want to run screaming through the streets right now, pounding on all the doors, shaking my fists at the sky like a madwoman, because it is sick that I think about all these things — but it isn’t me who’s sick, it’s the people who keep blocking change because they love their guns so much. Their precious 2nd Amendment. Same people who don’t care one iota that this president and this administration violate the Constitution every day of the week. Due process for immigrants? Screw that, but don’t you dare touch my guns.

Yes, I want my children to be able to text me if we are going to live in a country where certain people adamantly refuse to acknowledge what we are doing is not working.

Let’s be clear, because that’s how it has to be now, it is the Republican Party blocking sane gun control legislation at every turn. They say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Then they cut funding for mental health programs to the tune of $1 billion dollars in their Big, Unconscionable Bill.

On day one of his second term, the current president closed the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

If you’re Republican and you voted for this administration, you voted to make it easier for people to buy guns. You voted to defund mental health programs designed to decrease gun violence. These are facts to do with what you will, please remember them the next time you stare into the face of a child you love.

If you are “pro-Life” and you are someone who fights for “heartbeat laws” please note — every child who gets shot at school has a beating heart before the bullet hits them. A name, memories, people who love them, pasta art on the fridge. I’m enraged in case that isn’t clear, and underneath that rage is the despair of a mother wondering how many babies have to die before we do something. How many parents have to walk around feeling a hole in their heart the size of the entire universe?

My heart is broken for the kids at Brown University, and for their families. Two different kids at Brown were already in school shootings prior to the one they experienced last Saturday — Zoe Weissman and Mia Tretta. Mia Tretta was shot in the stomach at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita when she was fifteen years old. Her best friend was shot and she did not survive. So this is where we are now. Kids who experienced school shootings in middle school or high school may find themselves in another school shooting when they get to college.

Also, if you’re wondering how it could take five days to find the shooter, you are not alone. Reportedly they found him dead in a warehouse from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Now they’re saying he’s also responsible for the death of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in Brookline, MA. It’s a strange story and hard to feel confident in anything when the head of the FBI is busy spending taxpayer dollars flying to see his girlfriend and talking about it on podcasts. Making sure he has the right size FBI jacket when he has to hold a press conference pretending he knows what he’s doing.

This is what happens when the president is a rapey reality tv star and he waltzes into The People’s House with a cast of unqualified, unserious crapjackals. It’s what happens when people lose faith in their government, billionaires buy newspapers, and the Supreme Court gives a madman immunity.

My heart is broken for all of us. It’s broken for the kids who just lived through a school shooting at Brown University, and the two who did not, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. It breaks for the families who are mourning loved ones at Bondi Beach.

And it breaks for Rob and Michele Singer Reiner.

I keep thinking about how they never gave up on their son. About the pain and stress of having a child who is not well, is not okay — who is struggling for years. How they must have understood what was happening in those last moments — and it does me in. I feel so devastated for their kids, all of them. And in despair for all of us, over everything.

I didn’t watch the address to the nation or whatever it was. He’s just a ranting old narcissist sundowning away. It’s elder abuse at this point, someone who cares about him ought to put an end to this now, and retire him to Mar-a-Lago so he stops embarrassing himself and the entire country. The plaques? They’re not even rage-bait. They are the work of a childish man who should be painting by numbers and eating jello. If I had an ounce of feeling for the guy I’d be mortified for him.

Not even his wife cares. She’s too busy starring in weird movies about herself. Start a breast cancer foundation like a decent First Lady? Nah. A literacy foundation, or something to replenish the environment or help kids? Hell no. At least she’s pretending to give a f%ck about Christmas this year. They’ve tried to wipe this from the internet, by the way, but I’ve got you!

People say he didn’t write that disgusting message about the Reiners, the one spitting on their graves while the rest of us with hearts were devastated. They say Stephen Miller wrote it, and the POS approved it. He defended it the next day. These aren’t normal people. It’s even scarier to think he didn’t write it, because that means it was written by someone just as depraved, but with intention. Which means the next three years are going to be rough no matter what happens, which is a thing a lot of us said after we read Project 2025, but whatever.

Another incongruous thing amongst so many, there are a lot of Republicans who seem to love Rob Reiner’s film, The American President. It reminds me of the way the American flag has been co-opted by the GOP. The speech when President Andrew Shepard has finally had enough and he tells Bob Rumson if he wants to come after anyone, he’d better come after him, because Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of his league? They think that’s how a president should be.

Meanwhile, Bob Rumson is the Republican in that movie, Andrew Shepard is the “card-carrying member of the ACLU” — like me. Which would make him a “radical left-wing lunatic” in the parlance of our times. How does a current-day Republican watch that film and love it, think Andrew Shepard is wonderful, and then go to the ballot box and vote for Bob Rumson on steroids minus any redeeming qualities? Asking for all my friends.

Okay, well, third time’s it, friends. I guess the year will go out in the same way it came in, and the same way it’s continued to unfurl, which means we’ll have to work extra-hard to find the light. There are thirteen days left of this insane year. Maybe I’ll write a listicle before it’s over, but probably not. I will say this one last time before I go — they will not win. It’s already falling apart. No one wants this, no one sane, anyway. Which is good, because it can be a lot better than this.

So, maybe I managed to pull some hope out of the hat for you after all. Lots of love to you, friends. I’m so grateful you’re here.

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