Just another day in America

I wrote the following eight days ago. Eight ... days ... ago.

Let that sink in while you read:

Me, I just wonder when these moments of silence will become as much a pregame standard at our sporting events as the national anthem. "And now tonight's moment of silence for the victims in Waxahachie ... Hog Waller ... Ferndale ..."

That sort of thing.

Might as well start doing it now and beat the rush, I figure.

I say this because the country we were over the weekend is apparently the country we want to be, where a constitutional amendment gets warped beyond recognition and people die damn near every day because of it. What happened over the weekend in Milwaukee and Buffalo was only marginally abnormal, after all. Mostly it was just Tuesday.

"Mostly it was just Tuesday ..."

Well, yesterday was a Tuesday.

And now we can add "Uvalde, Texas" to Waxahachie and Hog Waller and Ferndale and whatever town is next to our moment of silence.

And there will be a next town. You can count on that as surely as you can count on the stars coming out on a clear spring night, because this is America, where the price of freedom is sending your kid to school not knowing if he or she will ever come home. 

The price yesterday was 19 children and two teachers on a clear spring day in Uvalde, a town of 15,214 that sits 80 miles west of San Antonio. Some sick twist -- 18 years old, a kid himself -- walked into a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire with some damn shootin' iron or another, and when he was done Uvalde's population had shrunk by 21 souls.

The police finally took him out, thank God.

Sometime in the future they'll have to do it again, because this is America, and a shooting gallery is apparently what we want America to be. Otherwise we wouldn't keep electing people who treat the Second Amendment like it's a religious tract, and only ever quote the back half of it anyway because it best fits their campaign platform of God, Guns and Freedom.

Well, good on you, folks. You can have your land of the free and home of the trigger-happy. You can water the tree of liberty with the blood of more innocents. You can free up more concealed carry permits that make law enforcement's job a nightmare and makes for jumpy cops who shoot first and ask questions later.

Which means more death by the gun, more dead cops/innocent civilians, more blood for that insatiable ol' liberty tree.

Somewhere today, the usual thoughts and prayers will be sent out by the usual suspects. And somewhere else (in Texas, maybe), some politician (Gov. Greg Abbott, maybe) will use the slaughter in Uvalde to push for arming teachers like an infantry battalion. 

Because that would be completely normal, and not, you know, evidence of what a completely insane place this country has become.

I used to love America because I know its history, good and bad, and in spite of that recognize it as an ultimately hopeful place. 

I still love America. But now I think America belongs in a straitjacket.

God help me. God help us all.