Enough

Yesterday my kid got in the car, and before we were even a mile away from school, he was sobbing in the passenger seat.

“A failed test?” I asked. “Someone being awful? What happened?”

“Why?” he sobbed through his hands. “Why are people so awful to other people? LGBTQ+? Black people? Why is it ok in this country to let people hurt anyone who is different from them? To hurt children?”

“Did something happen? Did you hear something?” I didn’t want to say the words that I was thinking out loud. I myself didn’t want them to be real, to call attention to The Great Delusion that we live in every day.

“No,” he sighed. “It’s all just too much, Mom. How do I live in this hatred every day? And now everyone says Generation Z is going to fix it. They are smart and going to save the world. How can we stop this? How is this fair?”

“Babe, no one generation can fix it alone. This is something we all need to work together.”

“But they aren’t. Things are just getting worse. And now it is on us or else we end up living in a broken world filled with hate.”

Driving past a homeless man sorting through dirty clothes in front of a McDonalds, a block away from multi-million dollar homes, all I could do was say “I’m sorry” over and over again. I held his hand as he cried all the way home. And I never told him what I’d heard on the way to pick him up from school.

19 children and 2 teachers were just murdered in an elementary school in Texas.