Good Mourning, America

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

It’s eighth-grade writing class day and the weekly morning jaunt to my favorite little school, nestled in a rural Southern California valley. Here, the water table’s level prevents developers from bulldozing nurseries and groves, and there’s still a farmer’s grange. A canopy of Live Oaks shades my drive to the school, where the children of immigrants are the dominant demographic. My child went to school here, transferred from our very-white hometown, so she’d no longer speak disparagingly of the Latinx kids on the playground. She didn’t understand back then that she’s one of them.

Today, my students are learning to make notecards for a research paper on climate change. The assigned article that challenges their English can no longer be found on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

“What did you all find most surprising about the article?” I ask.

“That the U.S. is the second biggest producer of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming,” one of them answers.

The students are smart. Smart and so young and hopeful. All but two or three of them want to attend college. They all have plans for the future. Here, in the United States.

They finish up their notecards.

“‘Heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related death in the Southwest, and heat waves are increasing in frequency and intensity.’ That’s a direct quote combined with a paraphrase,” a student says.

“Nice work! Now, before I go, let’s talk about the homework for next week. Please complete—”

An alarm blasts.

“We have to stop,” the classroom teacher says fast and loud. “That’s our emergency response signal. Everyone, under your desks, away from the windows. Quick. Nope, leave your stuff. Get down now. Manuel, I can see your head. Rosa, you’re visible from the window. Get under the desk—under! I don’t want to have to say it again.”

It’s an active shooter drill.

The signal blares while I tuck my laptop into my briefcase, and down the dregs of my coffee. The students are giggling, sprawled on the floor—the perfect opportunity to make quick contact with the objects of their desires. The teacher tells them to cool their jets.

“Okeydoke, nice work today, everyone,” I say. “See you all next week.”

There’s more giggling as I leave. The alarm continues pulsing danger. I hear it—feel it—on the way to my car.

•   •   •

It’s another day, a Sunday, my writing day. But I can’t.

Five mass shootings in twenty-four hours.*

• El Paso: Twenty dead and twenty-six injured. Now that’s twenty-one, now twenty-two.
• Dayton: Nine dead and twenty-seven injured.
• Memphis: One dead and three injured.
• Chicago: None killed but seven injured.
• Chicago: One dead and seven injured.

Numbers and names and the detritus of lives litter parking lots and store aisles and nightclubs and theaters and playgrounds and schools. Shootings are linked to hate websites, to Donald Trump, to manifestos, to mental illness, to familial discord, to immigration, to feminism, to news media, to the grotesque availability of guns.

So I wonder.

Which of my students will I be able to save when we have our school shooting?

How many of their heads will I be able to shove under desks before they are seen?

How many of their young bodies will expire in pools of blood, their cries for their mothers interrupted?

Will I die with them?

I wonder, because today, in this nation, with this president, with this Congress, with this NRA gun lobby, it feels inevitable.

* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

K-B’s narrative nonfiction, commentary, political fiction, book reviews and author features have been published in Evening Street Review and Evening Street Press, Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, December 2017), Publishers Weekly, Ducts magazine, The Missing Slate, Trivia: Feminist Voices, Ms. Magazine blog, North County Times, Gay San Diego, and others. She is the publisher and a founding editor of Writers Resist, and teaches Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Cal State University system. Read more of her work at ExcuseMeImWriting.com.

Editor’s note: The Trump in Guns photo was allegedly posted by one of the shooters on 8chan.