Maybe the Sun Will Shine Today

On Uvalde, online hate, and the world continuing to turn

Tim, with our daughter Tafv, 2018

Immediately after Tim’s father died in 1987, which I write about in a Modern Love piece, I recall very well not understanding how the sun was continuing to shine. That might seem like a sentimental line from a song but the sensation is real. That the world is still turning makes no sense, and you suspect in that moment you will never be relocated within it. There is also the dread that things will get back to normal, that you have somehow failed if you don’t make the knocked-out-of-your-own-life sensation permanent.

I imagine some people who lost children three days ago in the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas will not come back. I don’t mean to life as it was before, but to a sense that they are inside their own lives. They will, and likely despite entreaties from loving people, feel as though returning to the world is a betrayal. When my own daughter was young, I did not know whether I’d have been able to go on if lost her. I did not lose her. I have however been by her side as she went through the loss of her own father in 2019, and when she told me, recently, that she has not yet, in a sense, touched back down to earth.

I thought of this this morning after reading a blog post on The Graham Factor, whose author self-describes as a “washed-up ex-cop.” In the post, “A brief note for keyboard warriors,” he takes to task people castigating law enforcement on the scene in Uvalde for, as reported by some media, freezing outside an elementary school while inside 21 people, including 19 children ages 9 to 11, were being massacred. He knows he’s inviting hatred to rain down on his head, and he makes no bones about seeing things from a cop’s POV. Whether you agree with him or not, I think the perspective valuable. A clip:

So this entire post goes against my better judgment.

Critical incidents are an absolute nightmare for any police department to investigate. An event like what happened in Uvalde requires an investigative effort that journalists cannot even begin to comprehend. There is an enormous amount of video evidence, forensic evidence, and witness testimony. Every officer who fired his or her weapon must be subjected to both a criminal investigation and administrative use of force investigation. Of course, the suspect must also be investigated — this guy’s dead, but someone has to do the legwork and rule out any potential accomplices. Uvalde police are investigating 22 homicides and they’ve had 48 hours to do it. It’s safe to say at this stage that nobody knows anything at all.

Even the officers who personally witnessed this event probably aren’t sure what just happened. Many just had the following experience: Someone tried to murder them, and then they saw and maybe did first aid on the corpses of nineteen dead ten-year-olds who’d been blown apart by .223 rifle rounds. Those cops are at home smoking cigarettes and taking cold showers. Of course, what they are living through is not as bad as what the surviving victims and families are going through. But I can guarantee it is a hell of a lot worse than anything that 99.9% of Americans have lived through, and I include myself in that. Do you think they won’t be thinking about those kids every day for the rest of their lives? Fuck off.

I have friends reporting on what’s being seen as massive failures on the part of the officers in Uvalde, failures that may have resulted in the murder of children. I support efforts to report as diligently as possible. I likewise appreciate the stories of split-second bravery of parents and off-duty law enforcement. I messaged an El Paso-based BORTAC member I know, whose unit I presumed would have been dispatched to help local law enforcement, and asked how his fellow members were doing today.

“The guys struggling the most are the ones that triaged the kids after neutralizing the threat,” he wrote back. “We aren’t doing well right now.”

What happened in Uvalde is the hardest thing that will happen to some people. The rest of us, watching, do not know where to put our horror and rage, resulting in hatred for people triaging dying children. This does not strike me as a useful reaction, the impulse to hate those who were on the ground trying to help. I don’t know how courageously or cowardly law enforcement in Uvalde acted; I wasn’t there. I hope they did not fail but maybe they did. They will or will not hate themselves and be hated by the community they pledged to protect. They will or will not seek to do better. They will or will not receive the forgiveness of those who lost children. Nothing anyone does can bring these children back, including spewing vitriol into the online noise pool.

You know what might help? Or what helped me: listening yesterday to Matt Welch talk sensibly about gun control yesterday, on the most recent episode of The Fifth Column podcast:

I don’t know when or if the sun will shine again for those who’ve lost their children. I can leave you today with proof that the earth does continue to turn. Last summer, my daughter Tafv took a job in the set decorating department of the Hulu TV series “Reservation Dogs.” I’ve written here previously about her connections to this series - how it’s filmed in Okmulgee, where her dad and grandfather grew up; how a woman came up to her at Tim’s memorial, put her arms around Tafv, and told her she and Tim had been prom king and queen when they were at Indian boarding school together; how the creator of “Reservation Dogs” would turn out to be this woman’s son, Sterlin Harjo. To which I will add that two weeks ago, Sterlin asked Tafv to do a small scene in the show, as an inmate playing basketball, in homage to Tafv’s grandfather in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…

… but how that fell through because the actress set to play a speaking part as an ancestral spirit came down with COVID and Sterlin was like, “Okay, cuz, you’re it” to Tafv, a kid who pathologically does not want the camera on her, but who, earth turning and all, did the part, and who called yesterday after three days of filming to say, she was walking off set eating a sandwich when Sterlin called her back.

Nancy Rommelmann @NancyRomm

My daughter is finishing season 2 of @RezDogsFX, set decorator. The actress set to play a spirit ancestor caught COVID and Sterlin Harjo tapped Tavie (not an actress!) to do it. She'd just wrapped and was, she said, "walking off set eating a sandwich" when Sterlin called her back