The images from the school were heartbreaking. There is one of a girl with her backpack on, being comforted by man I'm presuming to be a teacher or administrator by how he is dressed. Her head is bowed in grief and shock, and she's still holding onto a Happy Valentine's Day balloon. It's a day when gifts of love are given and received. She probably went to school joyful, hopeful, eager. And now she's had innocence and trust stolen. Another harrowing image is of a mom with the ash cross on her forehead, because it was Ash Wednesday as well as Valentine's Day, and she's cradling another mom whose face is distorted in agony. The parents waited for hours to be reunited with their kids, or to learn they would never be. It was a day that was supposed to be filled with reverence and love.
The Tweets coming from the kids as they were barricaded inside the school were haunting. One was from a 14-year-old boy crouched under his desk. You can see that the classroom is dark and the front is empty; all the kids and the teachers are huddled on the ground in the back, with the lights off. There were kids hiding in lockers and closets, and had to be escorted out by SWAT members past their slain classmates.
And it's not rare. Last week I was reading an article about a little girl who was so traumatized by a shooting at her elementary school in 2016 that killed her friend, a sweet boy named Jacob who was the smallest child in their class, she could not return to school and has debilitating anxiety. She is anguished, and was diagnosed with PTSD. That shooting gained just a few moments of national attention since the number of casualties was small, and school shootings in our country have become so regular they don't cause us all to stand still in shock anymore. But it had deeply touched my little sister when she learned of it a few days later. She normally doesn't read the newspapers, but there was a picture of people dressed in superheroes costumes, and so she had assumed it would be fun. But it was about how mourners dressed up in them for Jacob's funeral as a way of paying tribute to him. The little girl in South Carolina who was Jacob's friend wrote a letter to Trump asking him what he was going to do to prevent school shootings from happening again. To her family's shock, she did receive a letter from him in response. He praised her for her bravery and thanked her for writing to him and Mrs. Trump, and told her that they loved children and wanted to keep them safe. After the initial astonishment wore off a few days later, she realized that Trump had never answered her question. He never explained how he planned on keeping kids safe from another gun shooting. So she wrote him a second letter asking for that answer. She still hasn't received a response.
