As is true for most people in America, this week has been difficult and heavy for me. Unlike most, my week was emotionally tumultuous prior to the school shooting in Uvalde, TX on Tuesday. On Monday night I went to see Sigur Ros in concert here in Austin. You might be thinking that sounds fun rather than traumatic and you would be partly right; it was fun. Unfortunately, the reason I went to that particular concert is because my friend John once told me that the best concert he ever went to was a Sigur Ros concert in 2013 in Kansas and that it was the Best. Day. Of. His. Life.
If you're here reading this and know me, you probably know that John died last October, which means that though I assume he said it hyperbolically, there actually aren't any more days to his life and if that really was the best one then it truly was the BEST day of his life and will never be topped. When I saw that Sigur Ros was coming to Austin I immediately bought tickets. How could I not? Unfortunately, it turns out that if the whole reason you buy tickets to a concert is because your late friend loved that band, you will absolutely spend the entire concert thinking about that. It was...exhausting.
The thought that kept popping up in my head unbidden was "If John knew Sigur Ros would be playing in Austin in May, maybe he wouldn't have jumped off that building in October."
It is a useless thing to think. There were surely many things that factored into his decision to end his life (not least among them the surely insurmountable odds of escaping the US carceral system unscathed) and while none of us will ever know exactly what was going on in his head when he made that decision, it seems reasonable to assume that a concert wouldn't have been enough to change his mind. Despite that, my brain kept bouncing between "John should be here for this, he would've loved it" and "If only he'd known, maybe he would have chosen to live for this."
In the past seven months, there have been so many things I've wished John was alive for. So many. The Sigur Ros concert was the most recent and, in some ways, the sharpest because though I like the band, if not for John I wouldn't have bothered going to see them in concert. I've spent a lot of time these seven months thinking about what is worth living for. The other side of the same thought process, of course, is what is worth dying for. Which brings me to Tuesday and the collective trauma we've all been grappling with this week. School shootings (and mass shootings in general) are senseless acts of violence. And there is no reason for them to continue. You know what isn't worth dying for? The opportunity for every American to have a gun. I'm not sorry for saying that because you know what? People are more important than guns. Children are absolutely more important than guns.
There is not a single child in the United States that I would argue is worth sacrificing in order to keep guns around. I don't understand if other people just don't realize that this issue boils down to that or if they are really so callous about the loss of these lives. I can't imagine anyone, even the most staunch supporter of the NRA, choosing to let their own child die in order for all Americans to have gun access. They wouldn't! So what makes other people's kids acceptable victims? They aren't. Nobody, least of all a child at their school, deserves to die in order for everyone to access guns without restrictions.
A couple posts I've seen over the past couple days have stuck with me. One was a tweet lamenting the fact that a tragedy like the Uvalde school shooting occurs and work just goes on; no time to collectively grieve and mourn, no opportunity to take time to collect ourselves, just keep showing up and putting in our hours through all the trauma. My friend posted the tweet to her instagram story and I replied that although time to grieve would be nice, the reality of the situation in our country is that mass shootings happen SO REGULARLY that if we were afforded time off to grieve them all, we would literally never work. No, really. Another post that's been stuck in my brain since I saw it is this one:
