Teachers All Over Cried Tuesday. Believe It.

All over this ailing nation, teachers cried Tuesday. They may still be crying.

They're crying because they hear the children crying. For not all of them died instantly. You can count on that. They cried out for their Mom and Dad, knowing they were beyond help.

Maybe that's why the murderer wiped some of them out such that the parents had to endure swabbing to guarantee a DNA match so that they could ensure identification. He probably couldn't stand the wailing he hadn't planned for, so he shot them again, shot them in the face to turn it off.

Teachers feel that agony. It is nearly too much. I felt it, too, while watching the now almost rote reports of this sick phenomena the corner for which only America has. I've no doubt that many had to turn off the TV, too.

Nobody who has spent a career in schools can detach from feeling what the parents of a new set of dead kids must be feeling. It's inevitable for them.

The abject emptiness, first of all. They understand that 19 helpless children and two teachers, wanting no more than to make it to summer vacation just two days away, are at once wiped from the map of humanity.

Yes, we now know that the local police messed up. If you aren't used to a situation, if. you can't visualize that the ultimate evil is upon you, you'll fall back on the presumption that all is or can still be well. But that shouldn't deflect us from the real issues.

So much joy, so much energy. Gone. So many possibilities, too.

For that's why those who stay in education do so: To embrace possibilities, so see all that in front of them. It drives them on. It allows them to endure the junk that gets in the way of it, junk that, sadly, the system provides for them all too often.

It allows them to endure someone else's theory and change in tactics: Let's try this. It causes them to roll their eyes in acceptance of the next great idea that never, ever has enough funding to ensure that it will even be tried completely, much less allowed to succeed. As they age, there is more eye-rolling.

But never complete despair. "You may give up on yourselves," I was fond of saying to each group I taught toward the end of my career, "but we will never give up on you."

Sometimes, someone needs to send that exact message and someone needs to hear it. For them, too, stuff gets in the way of the core issue: Doing well. Fulfilling one's potential, regardless of what that may be. Not so good in math, maybe, but a sure ace in English. You know, like that.

In 4th grade, kids need to hear that a lot. It's early for them, but their awareness is building. They can begin to see the world in front of them now. They can't help it; there are too many outside stimuli, far more than anyone reading this needed to absorb when they were that age. They need to hear: Not gonna be easy, but you've got this.

I know nothing about the gunman--journalism will handle that in the coming days--but in all likelihood, he sat in someone's 4th grade class once. He might have been hopeful and energetic. He might have had a sense of humor once, too. He must have lost all that somewhere. Darkness must have taken over.

If one of the first things he did after gaining the age of adulthood (certainly not adulthood in actuality) was to go out and get an automatic weapon, the purpose for which was never in doubt, something had already settled within him that was wicked and awful and, in the end, bullying. For only a bully storms a helpless education classroom and takes it over by slaughtering innocents. 

It's the same mentality to pick on someone else with name-calling and noises and transmitting their obvious inferiority. It's just taken to the nth degree, is all.

But bullies have terrible self-esteem. The murderer had to know that he wasn't going to survive that day, regardless of his plans. Or, he somehow had acquired such invincibility that he thought he would somehow escape.

Either way, he has inflicted incredible pain upon far more people than his nihilism could ever embrace. People are suffering now, suffering in empathy, suffering in vacant rooms once filled with joy, suffering out loud, suffering in silence.

Suffering, too, because it seems that the people who should act in common sense can't, or won't, once again. They make up solutions that provide phony bulwarks, strawmen that exist only in their own minds, to get the conversation behind them because the reality is too great for them to handle, too:

• Arm the teachers--Someone dusted this one off and brought it back. This would have been done already if teachers wanted to. But they don't want to. The reasons are so obvious that only a mindless dolt could have come up with it.
• Put retired military service or police in there--As if you could find enough of them willing to put their lives on the line again? Milwaukee can't even get enough lifeguards, despite raising the base wage, to guard more than four of 22 pools this summer. And you want to do what?

But never the weapons. Can't touch those. That's the other Big Lie that we've had to put up with for more than 30 years now, and still advancing: That someone wants to take away everyone's guns, that removing automatic weapons are a slippery slope, that mental health should be a greater priority.

Mental health will be a priority in Uvalde, Texas, you can count on that. For where does a school go after this? What does a community do? It never wanted to add to the growing list of places condemned forever to be a testament to our ridiculous obsession with guns and their effects: El Paso, San Bernardino, Oak Creek, Orlando, Parkview High, Columbine High, and the rest.

And of course, what do these families do? Recovery is impossible. How many will go sideways?

For the teachers there--perpetual haunting: That could have been me. Survivor guilt? Highly possible.

And tears. They have not ended, not by a long shot. There, and elsewhere. Teachers are not numb. They never will be. Thank goodness for their tears, ironically. It shows we have some soul left amongst us.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark