Voting is not enough to turn this nation and its communities around, although everyone MUST vote their conscience and core values. It’s a cornerstone strategy in change.

Nor is speaking out enough—although plaudits to every teacher, organization, political candidate and basketball coach who has spoken out against the ugly spasms of hate and violence. More, please—keep talking and keep writing about how we are collectively losing something we once thought invincible: a safe and just democracy.

Even policy will not save us, although it might have a positive impact—the assault weapons ban of 1994 did. Before it expired under George W. Bush’s watch, of course, when the rate of assault-weapon incidents tripled. There were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994. Today, there are 20 million.  Policy helps, but is insufficient.

Policy, political power and public discourse are valuable tools—but we need a public uprising, a change in hearts and minds. We can do better. We need to understand how connected we all are, first.

Education depends on safe, orderly, predictable systems—something that the COVID-19 pandemic undermined. It’s taught many of us how interdependent we all are and how interconnected our systems can be.   (Renee Owen, in Education Week.)

Here’s the thing I have been thinking about most, in the wash of grief over the two most recent shootings: The people we lost were community builders, those who sought and worked for safe, orderly and predictable systems in their own lives and towns.  Grandmothers, family caregivers, a retired cop. The supermarket where the Buffalo shooting occurred was a community-driven project to provide grocery shopping in a former food desert.

And the teachers in Uvalde were exactly the kinds of educators we need right now: Committed to kids, thoroughly embedded in the Uvalde community. Skilled veteran teachers. Role models, in a community where over half the citizens speak Spanish at home. They were obviously teaching the children in their care that they were valuable, that they could accomplish great things.

How were they doing this? Safe, orderly and predictable systems that put structure into their work at Robb Elementary School. Until one day, all of those interdependent, interconnected systems failed, and fourth graders were calling 911, begging the police to come and save their lives.

The national conversation right now is centered around what policies, tactics, and personnel could have prevented this.

Several popular-with-Republican theories have been roundly debunked: There were at least 19 good guys with guns who apparently did nothing. The community had already spent more than $600K in ‘hardening’ the building. There was a nine-member local SWAT team to handle shooters on the loose, but they were ‘unavailable.’ The resource officer wasn’t on site, and when he arrived, the shooter walked right past him.

Ted Cruz went with the inane ‘one door’ strategy, proving he’d never dropped his kids off at school—and Sean Hannity talked about trip wires, because those sound cool. That’s enraging, all right—almost as bad as Alex Jones asserting that Sandy Hook never happened.  

All of these ‘solutions’ and strategic assertions are missing the point, however.

Which is: What is there about the United States that breeds domestic terrorism? Especially in young men? We can—and absolutely should—limit access to weapons and ammunition. But why do these disaffected, weapon-toting kids with grudges keep emerging, to threaten peaceful shoppers and innocent fourth graders?

This brings up the question of what we should be aiming for, in public education.

How about this? Human beings who feel accepted as part of a community, and also know they have something to offer that community. You know, the building blocks of successful adulthood– things that make students finish high school with some optimism that the world of independent living and work will pan out for them.

With all the blah-blah about ‘learning loss’ (after a global pandemic, no less) and bogus testing data and parents screaming at school boards—have we taken our eye off what matters most?

Here’s something that made me think—from a piece in the Washington Post about how the gunman presented himself and interacted online:

Many of Ramos’ threats to assault women, the young women added, barely stood out from the undercurrent of sexism that pervades the Internet — something they said they have fought back against but also come to accept.

That made me incredibly sad. Not just empathy for the young women who are (still) fighting sexism. But that the internet, where countless kids hang out 24/7, is precisely where a kid could incubate the idea that shooting up a school would get him attention, establish himself as a badass dude.  

We have a generation of school-aged kids who have experienced significant loss of the safe, orderly and predictable routines found in school for two years. And now, parents are worried that we’re spending too much time on social and emotional issues?

Democrats will tell you their recipe for turning the country in a better direction: Voting. Speaking out. Policy solutions. Using the levers of democracy to save ourselves from a world we don’t want to live in.

But first, we need to stop demonizing those who want to help. The community builders. The teachers in whose classrooms the next shooter now sits.