Their Small Faces

 

It'll hit you as the pictures of the children from yesterday's horror in Uvalde, Texas, start being broadcast. Second, third and fourth graders, their small faces full of innocence and wonder, some smiling some not.  Their photos will shatter you and tear you up, like the photos from Sandy Hook Elementary did almost 10 years ago. At some point, their pictures will be small squares neatly displayed on your screen, nineteen of them and counting.

Our own children have little ones of elementary school age, and we shudder to think what parents and children are imagining this morning as they go off to school. We know what we're imagining and fearing, not only in schools but in grocery stores, parks, malls, and everywhere kids gather.  What needs to happen is for all parents, grandparents and their families to imagine the worst, and to channel that fear into a continuing, angry resolve to act, to demand action on gun safety, because that may be the only thing that saves us from this continuing darkness. 

The vile and bloody gun makers lobby's strategy after such massacres is to lay low and instruct their lackeys in politics (and by that we mean the Republican / Shooters / Great Replacement Party) to accuse those that want strong gun control legislation of "playing politics." They know that this is the EXACT time to discuss those measures before the country drifts back into its fog of memory and everyday life. We can't let that strategy work again, we can't be deterred or demoralized lest the future be like the past but worse. Look at the faces of the children from Uvalde, Newtown, and Parkland, and say you can't do anything.