It won't matter unless it personally effects them. Yes, even that. Kerrville flood, missing girls, etc
They're already yelled numb, they won't feel you. They won't care.
Even if we could sit every Texan down and walk them through how Trump and Elon’s Doge cuts led directly to the 195 dead, including the 27 from the girls’ camp, most wouldn’t care. We could prove the weather service funding cuts took away satellite access and data, we could prove one flash-flood specific office in San Antonio was empty and 3 weather offices in Kerr county (Kerrville) were empty, We could draw in crayon and highlighters cartoons about how the Kerrville officials who should’ve received a late-night emergency phone-call didn’t because FOUR offices who should’ve called weren’t filled, and the satellite information we should’ve been watching stopped existing to save money.. And some of those people will hate it, but don’t know what more they could do, but the rest just won’t care. They’ll have some accusation or rationale, usually some thought-terminating cliché, and they’ll move on.
I could talk about growing up in and around Kerrville and how I know that area and how I lived with a view of the Cyprus and the Guadalupe and I could talk shit about Tivy and The Taco Casa Stabbing lot and Johnny Manziel, but none of that matters..
What matters is Kerrville is an hour and a half from Uvalde.
If a bunch of dead kids nearby mattered… well we’ve had plenty of dead kids nearby. ‘The gun debate ended with Sandy Hook’2: We make children do school-shooter drills. Instead of changing anything about society we decided the children needed to stop being such pampered and easy targets. We didn’t ease tensions, we didn’t pay teachers more, we didn’t blink for a moment and ask what was driving Americans to do something so monstrous.
We repeatedly decided kids needed to toughen up and learn how to barricade classrooms and stay silent while crying and pissing themselves at the sounds of screaming and gunfire.
I could go on about how a school shooter drill, even the least traumatizing version, is forcing children to confront the reality that someone could just decide to murder a bunch of them and we’d rather have this system as-is than try being a system that kills fewer children.
3We, Americans, are the number 1 and number 2 causes of death for children in the United States. Americans with guns and Americans with cars. Why does this devastate me and not matter to a political majority of Americans? My heart is on my sleeve, outside my chest, where wild things may wash over it, where the truth of 95 dead hurts my soul..
Something is so broken within or so much more important to these people that they cannot care about others. Kerrville was so close to the Robb Elementary Uvalde shooting that they sent assistance. Kerrville watched 38 people get shot an hour and a half away by an 18 year old in an elementary school while the cops had a tailgate party in the parking lot with all their toys. A kid, legally an adult, but clearly still a child, murdered 17 children, 2 teachers, and wounded 17 more. Kerrville watched the news and stayed Kerrville. Texas stayed Texas. The US went on to allow Trump back into the white house..
I don’t see this one more thing as being enough to change MAGA and I don’t see it being enough for everyone else to fight back. The machine is designed to move on. Until something forces us all to personally care.. we won’t. I don’t mean that no one cares, I mean that we, as a people, as a nation, as a political history, do not care. It is not an issue we are significantly bothered with. We’ve all heard the poem: ‘first they came for X, but I wasn’t X, so I didn’t speak out’4. They came for the banking system and the campaign system and the welfare system and the public school system and the weather alert system.. I don’t see us rising up to stop them either. Significant effort is being taken on all sides and it has us exactly where we are. We don’t see each new disaster as a failure of our system and our previous efforts, we don’t see each new loss as a need for an order of magnitude more response so, without radical change, we will continue sliding.
Radical change is only possible when the people are discontent and ready to hear new ideas and prepared to force change. Maga are discontent and are ok with radical change. They accept every blatantly evil thing Trump does as part of the solution. They don’t understand the plan, but the big strong man is so big and strong that they don’t need to understand, just obey and repeat the mantras. They are clearly willing to ignore and excuse dumpsters full of dead kids slaughtered at our own hands with simple mantras: ‘crisis actors’, ‘arm the teachers’, ‘more cops’, ‘bad parents’, ‘immigrants’, ‘but her emails’, or school shootings have just.. “become a fact of life”-The Vice President5.
The protections they have are extremely powerful and save them from having to care from having to hurt. The unquestioning and uncritical belief in things they don’t understand saves them so much mental and emotional pain and effort. They don’t have to care.
And so long as we can say it is their fault and they need to change and they need to see and grow, while we place our faith in some non-existent system or moral arc of history.. we don’t have to do anything either. So long as we scapegoat America’s problems on them, we’re not to blame for failing to stop them. If they’re narcissists then we’re the abused and enabling. Our learned-helplessness is bone deep, bred and beaten into us. The last civil rights movement ended in bullets and repealed programs and eroded progress.
We know they don’t care.
Move on until they choose to.
Either:
Keep shouting ineffectively, toothless and impotent.
Give them a better choice.
Give them consequences.
Love, Robin
Dan Hodges,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/
N Engl J Med. 2018 December 20; 379(25): 2468–2475. doi:10.1056/NEJMsr1804754
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/06/georgia-school-shooting-trump-vance-harris