It’s my sister’s birthday, happy birthday Sandy… now for a warm morning coffee muses.

 

I am somewhat numb this morning… Yesterday’s tragedy unfolding just a few miles down the road had me glued to my TV/Internet almost all day.

My heart is broken that once again it is our kids that must pay the price of lost innocence for our failure to protect them from violence in our schools.

All day long the news helicopters  were visible from my back porch. When I went out in the afternoon, convoys of police support vehicles rolled thru town headed for the Santa Fe High School.

Gun violence of this nature is a uniquely American tragedy. Played out way to often, and to often on our children. My heart breaks for the latest families to be impacted, for their community, for American’s being forced to live thru these events over and over and over again. This is not normal, this isn’t supposed to happen again and again. In any rational world we would figure a way to end this once and for all. Sadly America, we left rational in the dust long ago…

I listened to some professor on the radio saying we should treat all of our schools to a level of security imposed by the TSA on airports because he had never heard of an attack of this nature at an airport. A ludicrous proposition if I ever heard one. The scale of the proposition makes Trump’s wall look small. TSA secures a limited number of relatively  secure structures, at an annual cost of about $6.6 billion.  There are roughly 5,100 public airports. There are over 100,000 schools in America. Think about those numbers for a while.

And then there was our Governor, Gregg Abbot was adamant that they, the Texas leg, were going to address this issue. They will allocate the necessary resources to protect our students… Funny that… They’ve spent decades defunding the  school system in Texas, now we are supposed to believe the Texas ledge and the Texas Governor are going to spend money on the Texas education system even if it’s to insure the kids safety and has nothing to do with teaching the kids. Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it and not a second sooner. So my heart breaks for Texas students. They shouldn’t have to fear going to school.

My heart goes out to our neighbors just down the road. Their lives will never be the same. My heart goes out to all of the families impacted by gun violence in America. Maybe when the students of this generation is the voting majority in America we will see a change in the way we allow gun violence to trump the rights of everyone.

My heart is broken today…