The Souls of the Children

The Yard has staff that monitor all the major news outlets to bring stories to the production team.  Some days it is a tough slog but lately it has been a surreal one.  With Russian tanks still obliterating Ukraine towns and villages, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are stealing all the headlines. Ukraine is fighting a real terror in Russia but has been relegated to page six.  Depp and Heard are fighting a self-inflicted race to the bottom that neither will win.  There is a malevolent baby formula shortage that is layering more anxiety on already stressed families.  The Supreme court leakage on Roe versus Wade being overturned lit the protest on both sides of the divide.  The lack of formula and the abortion ruling are being hotly debated in the Senate and in public.  The protests have been warlike from both camps.  Strange bedfellows those two prescient issues. Stranger bedfellows are the ancient predominantly male judges who are deciding what a woman can do with her biology.  Most Americans, besides the religious right, believe in a woman’s right to choose.

 

The furtive debate about Roe versus Wade has been ongoing since its original passage. Why fifty years later this “abomination” needs to be overturned is unclear. There is precedent in maintaining a law that has been effective for women ‘s rights for five decades.  Why now?  So, parents can raise their children and send them off to school to be killed by a deranged eighteen-year-old gunman with an assault rifle.  There has been rabid debate about abortion since the Supreme Court leak, but 19 children got killed in Texas last week, but no productive debate on gun laws.  Bearded lizard Ted Cruz denounced the shooting but yelled that nothing the Dems were proposing would have stopped that shooting! Ted did not indicate what he is proposing besides dropping out of a keynote address at the NRA national convention in Houston.  Ted does not have any fresh ideas, but he knows how to avoid bad optics.  Why are we as a nation so eager to force women to have unwanted children but unwilling to create an environment where children can survive attending school?  When Yard was raising the Yardlets, school survival was never in question. We wanted our children to thrive!

 

The US diplomats take China to task on a regular basis over human rights abuses.  The Uyghurs and other Chinese Muslims are systemically having their human rights denied.   The Yard is not involved in this discussion, but we have never heard of a mass shooting anywhere in China.  The Chinese have denounced the US hypocrisy because our children are killed in their classrooms and minorities are harassed by police.  They have a point.  We throw stones at them half a world away and we cannot protect our children in our neighborhoods.  We are a country that allows an 18-year-old to buy an assault rifle on May 17, 375 rounds of ammo on May 18 and then kill nineteen children on May 25.  We cannot figure out a way to break that chain of events. Other countries have had mass shootings that lead to significant gun law changes and have had few if any future incidents.  New Zealand, Switzerland and Australia all dealt with their shooting crisis with swift government actions.  In the US, there have already been 213 mass shootings in 2022 in 148 days. There were 698 in 2021. We do not believe anyone finds this acceptable. How is the US a World Leader when we allow our children to be murdered in their classrooms in startling manner and numbers! We are the world leader in deaths in the classroom.  Our politicians cannot figure out how to feed our children before they are sent off to war in the classroom.

 

One of the loudest voices of outrage was NBA coach Steve Kerr.  He was more outraged than Ted Cruz or most other politicians.  Kerr is in the NBA Finals for the sixth time in eight years.  He has a lot going on, but he is also a father of three.  Gun violence ripped Kerr’s life apart when his father was assassinated by Jihadists while serving as President of American University in Beirut.  Malcom Kerr had done nothing wrong except to be an American target in a dangerous land.  It was not innocent children being killed but a 52-year-old father ripped from his family. Kerr was an 18-year-old freshman at University of Arizona when he lost his father to two shots to the back of his head.  Coach Kerr realizes that there are far more important things than the NBA Finals.  No child in Uvalde did anything wrong, either. The soul of our nation is under siege.