Massacres of the Innocents

Over the last 90 days, like so many people, I’ve been appalled by the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians at the hands of the Russians as part of their self-styled “special military operation” in— and alleged “denazification” of—Ukraine, especially the tragic deaths of young children in the indiscriminate fusillades of artillery, bombs, and missiles hurled at Odessa and other cities. Why do Putin and his generals think that toddlers are vicious neo-Nazis worthy of extermination?

However, lest I fool myself into thinking that such horrific brutality and callousness to human life is only “over there,” the recent racist-inspired mass shooting in Buffalo is bloody testimony that the Russians are not the only haters in this troubled world—and, in fact, mass murderers cut bloody swaths throughout the United States, though, technically, our country is not at war.

And now comes the tragic news that still another mass murderer has butchered more children—this time 19 elementary school kids from a predominantly Hispanic school in rural Texas—along with 2 school staff.

I reflected on these melancholy body counts from last two acts of butchery in the context of another incredible loss of life in this country: 1 million dead of COVID. In a recent Time op-ed piece, Jerome Karabel, a sociology prof at UC Berkeley, has calculated that, had U.S. citizens followed the guidance of public health officials to wear masks, socially distance, and get vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus at the same percentages as Canadians did these things, we could have saved as many as 646,970 of those million lives.

However, in the name of freedom, a very large number of Americans, starting with then-president Donald J. Trump down to numerous less well-known citizens, flagrantly flouted this advice, “sticking it to the liberals” by spurning such measures as egregious abridgements of their God-given rights. And, of course, among those rights is the right to bear arms—which, thanks to the efforts of the gun lobby and despite years of horrific mass murders, remain sacrosanct and unchallenged by meaningful gun control laws.

So, apparently, we as a society are prepared to pay a very high price indeed in terms of human carnage for such rights. But not all rights are created equal: rights that don’t cater to those who claim white, male, cisgendered, heteronormative privilege are routinely trampled. Consider, for example, reproductive rights: the Supreme Court stands ready to dismiss 50 years of legal precedent by overturning Rowe v. Wade.

Then, consider the rights of another marginalized minority—trans athletes and children. Those are being abridged throughout the U.S., though especially in the South, which, of course, includes Texas, site of the most recent gun-violence tragedy. Ironically, Southerners claim that their discriminatory bans on transgender athletes and childhood transgender medical care are measures meant to protect children.

I don’t believe this for a hot second, but, for sake of argument, let’s say that Southern politicians, like Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, truly care about children. They might point to their anti-abortion stance as protective of unborn children and, therefore, consistent with protecting athletes from supposedly unfair competition by trans students and shielding children from trans medical care. Yet, if they’re so keen on child welfare, how can they block gun control, when, as we’ve seen in Uvalde and at Sandy Hook, children are often the victims of gun violence?

The answer, of course, is that Abbot, DeSantis, and their ilk are callous hypocrites. They claim to care so much about the lives of unborn children then turn a blind eye to the suffering they cause trans kids, who—untreated and ostracized—engage in self-harm at frighteningly high rates. And, of course, they champion the cause of the gun lobby even in the face of massacres of the innocents in places like Uvalde.