When the gunman attacked in Uvalde, it'd been just 10 days since a shooter with alleged white supremacist views targeted and killed Black shoppers in Buffalo. Numbness to this reality, I think, is one way to cope with the fact that trauma is a feature of American life, not an unintended defect. In Uvalde, the small town west of San Antonio where the shooting took place, the violence stole parents from their babies, and babies from their parents.
I am a mother but you needn't be one to grasp the devastating grief and longing contained in this single sentence. 'I want you to come back to me mom,' she wrote. Her bereft daughter composed a heartbreaking goodbye in the Notes app and shared it with the world. Then, on Twitter, I came across a tribute to Eva Mireles, the 4th grade teacher who died trying to shield her students from an 18-year-old reportedly armed with an AR-15-style rifle. I'd seen a version of this happen so many times before. Distraught yet desensitized, I couldn't express grief. After learning that a gunman murdered 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, it took me nearly 24 hours to weep. Becoming numb is inevitable when living in a country that makes killing people easy.
