San Antonio, Texas, the city where I currently live, is located about eighty miles away from Uvalde, a town that has been in the news a lot in recent days.
Unless you’ve been doing a Rip Van Winkle lately or are someone who lives outside the United States, I probably don’t need to tell you that in Uvalde, a little town of mesquite and pecan trees located due west of the Alamo City, a massacre of school children and teachers, carried out via an AR15, recently took place a mere two days before the end of the school year. The death toll, after all the bodies were located and hauled away, was twenty-two, including the killer himself.
I’ve never actually been to Uvalde, but I feel like I know the place inside and out because I grew up in such towns. America is often known by its great cities—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, just to name a few—but the country is filled with “Uvaldes,” the sorts of locales prevalent in what some have called “flyover country.” Uvalde is the kind of town you’d stop in to fill up with gas and grab a quick bite before heading off to someplace else, someplace where more important things happen.
Last night, on the local news, I watched an interview with a mother and a grandfather of one of the murdered children. The interviewees spoke English with a noticeable accent. The man, likely someone in his sixties, told the story of how he’d just brought his granddaughter a new softball glove because she was an avid player and had, in fact, been named to the local all-star team. He cried while talking about how she’d never even had a chance to use it in a game. The mother was more defiant, more obviously angry. She had met with Biden on his recent trip to Uvalde and had told him that he had to do something. While being interviewed, she mentioned that he had the power to make a change in gun laws.
I immediately began to wonder if the mother really believed that Biden could just make things better. As someone who pays attention to what’s taking place in my home country, I know that far too few understand how government works. Too few understand that the federal government is made of up of three branches and that “checks and balances” exist to assure that none of the three becomes too powerful. They might not understand that the president, because he is the one who so often speaks on TV, has no legislative role other than to voice a list of priorities and then try to persuade lawmakers to act. Far too many likely think that he can simply “do things” to make things better. Knowing that there is a woeful paucity of knowledge about things like history, geography, and civics terrifies me. Many of those historical American figures who played a pivotal role in creating the founding documents upon which the political culture and institutions of self-governance were created, have said, in one way or another, that democracy cannot exist in a place where the citizenry is uninformed or underinformed.
And what we have is a country that is far too underinformed. Such a sad state of affairs can be laid at the feet of those who’ve underemphasized and underfunded education for decades. Part of the blame is with us—the citizens. We’ve gotten lazy. Paying attention and being engaged has gotten too hard for us; it’s too boring. And now, because we’ve all been less involved that we should have been, we’re paying a huge price in many different ways. This disengagement is literally killing our children. The metaphorical chickens have come to roost.
Shame on us…
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