I have no idea how to be a mother in the United States, and yet here I am. A few weeks ago, I wrote about sitting outside of my son’s daycare for hours, waiting for a school-wide lockdown—the second in a month—to be lifted. Words are insufficient, and yet words are also starting points in the wake of state-sanctioned terror like the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas yesterday. This morning, then, I’m offering the essay below—on the interwoven threads of masculinity, guns, and the nuclear family in the U.S.—based on my time as an investigative reporter in the South, a teacher in a large Midwestern university, and a daughter in a wealthy, white, racist family of gun-owners and self-important men.
Ahead of that essay, a few thoughts on opportunities to direct rage and grief into action: Advocating for gun control and background checks, and voting for officials who will seek this kind of legislation above and beyond caring about their own electability, is a must. Almost equally as important, however, is to change the way we live within our communities—to do the hard thing of actively cultivating an interest in and care for the kids who are not our kids, the students who alarm us as teachers, the neighbors who seem most unlike us. And if you are from a family like mine—if you have grandparents who value the second amendment over the rights of their grandchildren to not get killed in school, or aunts and uncles who are part of the population celebrating the dismantling of abortion access in the U.S. while praying to God and fetishizing guns in the wake of the Robb Elementary and Buffalo grocery store massacres—I’d gently suggest that you log off Twitter and start with them, start with yourself. We have to be as willing to face, change, and act on our own roles in our families and our communities as much as we are willing to take to the internet to collectively rage and mourn. We can fight with our votes and our Twitter avatars, but it means little if we’re not willing to risk “impoliteness,” discomfort, and conflict within our daily lives, our blood relations, our physical existence.
It means little if we’re not willing to examine the ways in which we’re complicit in American death, and the ways in which we then might be able to use that self-honesty to live with more solidarity and care in our local communities—at the same time as we demand our elected officials govern in a way that actually protects the most vulnerable among us. In this spirit, I offer the essay below.