The second I saw there had been a school shooting in Nashville, I thought of my friend. Her daughter’s family lives in the area where the Covenant School is. I have been to their home. And I spent time with my friend’s 3 sweet granddaughters a few years ago. Please don’t let it be their school, I said to myself. So I messaged my friend. I didn’t hear from her for an hour. A dread started to fill me. I felt sick to my stomach and kept checking my messages over and over. Finally she confirmed they were okay. She said their school was a couple miles from Covenant, but they were friends through their church with 1 of the 3 little children who were killed, murdered, taken from their families. And the mom of 9 year old Evelyn, one of the little girls who perished, was their Sunday School teacher. So as my friend was supporting her daughter’s family in their sorrow, she was also trying to cope with her own horrific memory from decades ago of losing one of her daughters at 8 years old in an auto accident. No one lives in a vacuum. We all are just a precious few degrees away from unending grief and sorrow.

As I watched and read about the mass shooting from where I live in Indiana, I thought of my home state of Tennessee. I grew up in Knoxville, a beautiful area close to the mountains. I also lived in Nashville early in my music career, then went back again about 25 years later for a short time. My love-hate feelings about my birth state came roaring back as I began to watch the reactions of the Republican state officials, on up to Republican lawmakers in Washington D.C. They were all twisting the facts, ignoring that an AR-15 rifle somehow has nothing to do with ripping apart, actually shredding the bodies of its victims. As if guns are never the problem. As if they can do nothing to stop the murdering of our children and the innocent adults trying to protect them. 

Then I saw the photo of the school bus with a little girl crying as she pressed her hand on the window, as if pleading, “Help me!” She was being transported to a church, a ‘reunification center’ to reunite with her parents. I wanted to quote tweet that image on my feed. But when I placed my fingers on my keyboard to type, all I could utter was, “I just cannot…”

I just cannot imagine the terror she was feeling. I just cannot think how terrified her mother must have been while waiting to see if her daughter was alive. I just cannot believe that we as a country can’t manage to raise enough hell to stop this insanity. I just cannot believe that a woman Senator, Marsha Blackburn, could possibly offer genuine compassionate help to those grieving families when she herself had taken $1.3 million dollars from the NRA to push their agenda of power and money, and more money, and more money. I just cannot ever understand how Congressman Andy Ogles, the representative of the district where the shooting took place, sent out a Christmas card with his smiling family brandishing assault weapons. I just cannot wrap my head around the ignorance of Congressman Tim Burchett who represents the city I grew up in saying, “We’re not gonna fix it.” How could someone like him, who also appears to be very close friends with the dregs of the Republican congress, ever get elected? Then I flashed back to a long forgotten memory. 

The part of South Knoxville that my uncle was driving to was not a great area. But he seemed proud of where he was taking me, so I was happy to tag along. As we drove along in the dark, he told me that he was helping some friends with an election of some kind. I was very young at the time, but old enough to question who he was going to see in such a small dingy house with a few cars parked outside. Having grown up in a middle class neighborhood, I understood that this was not where I would normally be allowed to go.  

As he opened the door, I remember seeing several men sitting around a table, the kind I had seen in my church basement for pitch-in dinners or when my Brownie Scout troop met there. The fluorescent light filtered through a haze of cigarette smoke as my uncle was greeted by a couple of the men. There were pamphlets stacked on the table, but little else to indicate that any kind of real work was being done. Thinking back about it now, it seemed more like a substitute for a local pool room hangout. But what I did notice more than anything else was the sneering, sickening grins on the faces lounging around the table. I had seen faces like that before when random men would call my cousin Robert the horrible N-word because he was part Cherokee and tanned very deeply in the summer. I now know that on this night, I had come face to face with local South Knoxville politics. And it was obvious to me even at 9 or 10 years old, that those men didn’t respect my uncle. They acted as if they knew something he didn’t. With a sneering sideway glance, they suddenly looked like the gangsters I had seen in black and white movies. Black and white. Yes…

This kind of back-room stink in politics begins its slimy journey locally, then on to state capitol buildings, all the way to Washington, D.C. And by the time that stink of prejudice, married up with money, reaches the Halls of Congress, it can’t be washed off. It’s in the DNA. Case in point is the fall of Lindsey Graham, reduced to grifting on cable TV, begging for donations. The now indicted grifter-in-chief has minions everywhere willing to debase themselves for fear of their own slime being revealed, as if we can’t already smell it on them.

So what is the answer? How do we protect innocent children and adults who do no more than go to school in the morning? I believe that we must invest our time and support in the youngest voters who show up and protest with the outrage of an entire generation of children and young adults who have lived through school shootings. They grew up going through hours of survival drills, and innocently went to school as if nothing could happen to them…until it did. 

The shame I feel for ever supporting a Republican for any elected office won’t help anyone now. But my vote and my voice may. I shall continue to use both as I can. Please do the same.