We Kill Children

This piece is part of Yellow Scene Magazine’s Opinion section. The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not represent a reported news position. At Yellow Scene, opinion pieces speak freely, challenge assumptions, and say the quiet parts out loud.

More dead children, shot by a disturbed young adult in Minneapolis. More thoughts and prayers.

Late that evening, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and MSNBC’s Jen Psaki tearfully suggested that we see our own children in the latest shooting victims, an 8 year-old boy and 10 year-old girl.

Imagining that pain, they and others suggest, may motivate meaningful change.

The shooting in Minneapolis was indeed horrible. And yes, I imagined my own beautiful grandchildren. Who wouldn’t?

Albeit painful, it’s easy to imagine and feel pangs of terror if the dead children are white and American.

If the tragic deaths of cute, white, American kids can lead to meaningful reductions in gun violence, I suppose the “imagine your own children” empathy is valuable. But I’m sure the sincere tears will have no impact. By the next morning, conservative mouthpieces were spouting the same vile nonsense about “people kill people, not guns” and vicious demonization of all trans people.

Gun manufacturers, dealers and lobbyists rake in millions with no regard for the mayhem they create. The rhetoric is unbearable. “Guns are just tools.” “It’s not a gun problem, it’s a mental health problem.” That one is particularly galling because our Dear Leader and friends are also decimating mental health services.

It’s been clear for a dozen years that if 20 dead, white, American children in Sandy Hook couldn’t change our approach to gun violence, nothing would.

The scale of death increases geometrically and empathy shrinks when the children do not look like ours.

You may know that gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American youth. You may not know that Black kids are 8 times more likely to be the victims. I invite you to reflect on the relatively meager media attention drawn to the violent deaths of young Black children.

And our empathy seems to shrivel away entirely when the children are at some distance.

On August 15th, Donald Trump welcomed Vladimir Putin to a friendly chat in Alaska. Red carpets were rolled out for both “dignitaries,” a word I enclose in quotes because these two are the antithesis of “dignified.”  Trump exited first and, as Putin approached the red carpet intersection, clapped his hands and grinned like a child about to receive an ice cream sundae.

Less than two weeks later, on August 28th, Putin unleashed a horrendous airstrike on Ukraine, killing 23 innocents, including four children. An estimated 2,500 children have been killed or maimed in Russian attacks since the war began. I guess that Nobel Peace Prize will have to wait.

Israel, fortified by American support and weaponry, kills 28 Palestinian children every day – an estimated 18,000 in all since the genocide commenced. Not a thought, prayer or “imagine your own child!” is heard.

Our complicity in child mortality is not limited to war violence.

The Washington Post reported, “An analysis by a 15-member research team from Spain, Brazil, Mozambique and the US, published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet, estimates more than 14 million people could die by 2030 as a result of USAID cuts, including 4.5 million children younger than 5 years old.”

The Guardian writes, “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will be ‘personally responsible’ for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children after he refused to renew US funding for a global vaccines body, public health experts said.”

And, closer to home, the Secretary of “Health” and Human Stupidity is blowing up the CDC, making it quite sure that children will die from any number of diseases that could be prevented or cured.

Gun violence in America is a moral failing. But the failure to see “the other” is immoral on a far more massive scale.

A dead child in Gaza or Kyiv is as great a tragedy as a dead child in a Minneapolis pew.

RFK, Jr. is as responsible for the preventable death of a child in an underdeveloped country as a shooter is for a death in the Annunciation Church.

And Donald Trump would have the deaths of “4.5 million children younger than 5 years old” on his conscience, but he has none.

The loss of any child is unbearable.

And not just if they look like ours.

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