What It is Like Here ⇥ defector.com

Sometimes, when it seems like there are no words left, a writer finds the last few hundred that feel relevant and right. This post deals with some pretty heavy subject matter, for obvious and painful reasons.

Albert Burneko, Defector:

Those 19 little kids will never get to learn anything else about the world after what this country showed them in the violent, incomprehensible last moments of their lives, when the people who loved them could not protect them or be with them or help them make sense of it. What they learned then, whatever they learned, is the verdict. Watch America decide that this is the only way things can be. Watch it sentence more little kids to abbreviated lives and lonely, terrified, violent deaths. Watch the grownups squabble and roll the dice on every small new person who greets the world with eager curiosity, who doesn’t know better than to just assume that life can be gentle and guided by care. Watch them negotiate each little life against what they want to pretend to believe about some garbled shit written on a piece of parchment 200 years ago by no one who could imagine what happened in that school on Tuesday. This is what it’s like here. […]

It is unsurprising to see many people my age reporting a loss of confidence in lawmakers and political systems that never fail to fail. It is governance being dismantled from the inside, with predictable and devastating results.