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When Elizabeth Barese picked up her 11-year-old son from school on Monday, she knew she had to tell him that a shooting had happened the same day at the school neighboring their family home in Nashville.
"We're right next door and there was a police presence," the 47-year-old told AFP. "I had to address it right away with him."
Standing in front of the crosses erected outside the entrance to The Covenant School bearing the names of the six victims, three of them young children, Barese said: "It's not a conversation you want to have with your kids."
"It's a delicate balance of being honest with your kids and not scaring them."
The same dilemma is being faced by countless American parents in the face of yet another school shooting to rock the country, leaving them needing to comfort their children, all the while reeling from their own anguish and fear.
Gun violence is a constant in the United States, a country of about 330 million people awash with more than 400 million guns.
Schools have not been spared, with assaults on educational institutions strikingly common.
Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, there have been 376 school shootings across the country, according to data gathered by The Washington Post, with 199 people killed and 424 injured. All told, the data shows more than 348,000 students exposed to gun violence at their school.
For US parents, those growing numbers mean a persistent worry that their children's school could be next.
A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly a third of parents of school-aged children said they were "very or extremely" worried.
"The kids was like, 'Dad, they're talking about the shooting everywhere, the radio, the school, the news, the TV... why did kids get killed?'" he said.
"We never thought we'd have to talk to our kids about things like this at this age," he said, shaking his head.
"They're in elementary school and we have to tell them about what to do and prepare for, if something like this happens."
Shooting drills have proliferated at schools in the United States, such as one Barese witnessed at her child's school.
"It made me cry," she said, her voice cracking with emotion.
After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, in which 20 children and six adults were killed, her then-three-year-old daughter's preschool began active shooter drills -- a fact that made her "want to throw up," she said.
'Reassure'
But Barese, who has called Tennessee home for 18 years, said she's grateful for the advice her son's school offered on how to broach Monday's tragedy.
"They didn't want the kids talking to their friends. They wanted the information to come from the parents. They wanted the information to be honest, and to not give more information than was needed," she said.
After the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 people dead, Barese said she wrote a post on social media reading, "I don't know when the next one is going to happen but I hope to God it's not Nashville."
"But I know there's going to be another one."
'Why did kids get killed?'
Xsavier Cleary, who lives some 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the Covenant elementary school, came to pay his respects with his own kids' safety on his mind.
"We just wonder now, are our kids still safe in schools?" he said.
On Monday, he said his children, aged from three to 22, could not escape talk of the shooting, in which a 28-year-old heavily armed shooter broke into the small private Christian school and killed six people -- three staff and three students.
Following the guidance, she answered her children's questions, but watched the news in another room.
US psychologists have for years provided resources to help parents deal with these discussions.
The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) put tips online for parents and teachers on talking to children about violence, including in schools.
Number one on the list: "Reassure children that they are safe. Emphasize that schools are very safe," underlining the difference between the "possibility" of something happening and its "probability."
That is easier said than done, said another mother, who didn't want to give her name and works at the hospital where some of the Covenant School victims were brought.
"You want to assure them that they're safe," she said, tears in her eyes. "We're saying those words but we don't believe them."
© Agence France-Presse
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Josh Hawley, of Missouri, has demonstrated that he’s one of the most dangerous men in the United States Senate. He took to the floor Tuesday, the day after a shooting massacre in Nashville that left three 9-year-olds and three adults shot to pieces. He said he would introduce a resolution condemning the massacre as a hate crime.
“I call on every member of this body to condemn, in the clearest of terms, this hate crime against this community in Nashville,” he said. “I will introduce a resolution explicitly condemning this massacre as the hate crime that it is. I’m calling on this body to condemn hateful rhetoric that leads to violence – against hateful rhetoric against religious believers, religious institutions, religious communities that leads to violence. This isn’t speculation. This is a tragic fact.”
Superficially, this seems unexceptional, almost familiar, as Hawley is borrowing from liberal discussions about condemning hate crimes that have been committed in places like Pittsburgh (Jews), Charleston (Black people) and El Paso (Hispanics). Not only that, because this is Hawley speaking, who’s one of the most daring and ambitious voices in right-wing politics, it almost looks like he’s joining the liberals.
READ MORE: All they care about is defending traditional hierarchies
He’s not.
What he’s doing is what merchants of right-wing politics do. They do not want to solve problems. They do not want to help people. The government is for neither. The government is for controlling people, especially outpeople, which is to say, people on the margins of our society. But to do that, the world must be turned upside down, backwards and prolapsed. To some degree, Hawley’s succeeding.
He’s one of the most dangerous men in Washington.
Fact is, the massacre of believers is committed by white men, almost totally, according to a new study of 58 religious massacres over 10 years by the International Commission to Combat Religious Racism. Many “openly declared their intent to protect the white race or to ‘defend’ their country against non-white, non-Christian ‘invaders,’” said Danielle Boaz of the Public Religion Research Institute.
In an opinion piece for the Religion News Service, Boaz said the study found that shooters were hardly “lone wolves.” They were part of a “larger conspiracy.” In half of the cases, Boaz wrote, “the perpetrators attacked or planned to attack more than one site. In total, nearly two-thirds of the cases involved a series of attacks, multiple perpetrators and/or affiliation with an extremist group.”
READ MORE: The GOP is the party of death
But the conspiracy is bigger than that.
The study found that support for the “arguments that are fueling racially motivated attacks on places of worship” are “overwhelming” among so-called Christian nationalists, meaning people who believe God gave them America to dominate everyone else in God’s name.
Boaz said the study found “10 percent of Americans could be classified as adherents of Christian nationalism and that nearly 20 percent are sympathizers.” Of white evangelicals, she said, “almost two-thirds are adherents (29 percent) or sympathizers (35 percent).”
“Large segments of the population refuse to believe white supremacy is an issue in the United States today,” Boaz said, and “many of them appear to share the beliefs of the perpetrators of these attacks.”
That’s a tragic fact.
But for Hawley to succeed, he must turn tragic facts upside down, backwards and prolapse. White Christians, many already believing America is being invaded by nonwhite, non-Christians, are the “real victims” of “hateful rhetoric that leads to violence … against religious believers, religious institutions, religious communities.”
In the dead Nashville shooter, Hawley has found his evidence.
The Nashville police chief said Audrey Hale was transgender. Whether that’s true is still an open question. Whether that matters to the investigation is, too. Nothing I have read about the massacre mentions her identity outside the police chief’s statement.
But that doesn’t matter to the people Hawley’s talking to. Right-wing politics already foams over trans issues. Trans people are already monsters. Audrey Hale adds a new layer. Trans people are now adherents to a radical ideology, akin to jihadism, that turns them into murderous terrorists. “This isn’t speculation. This is a tragic fact.”
Hale does more than that.
In right-wing politics, liberal values and democratic politics are already suspect, if not criminal, because they undermine the status quo or, in the case of gender politics, “the natural order of things” in which men are men and women are women. They change things using rhetoric to persuade a majority, in the case of gender politics, that trans people are real people with equal rights and freedoms.
In right-wing politics, things would be better if they shut up.
What better way to stop people from criticizing “the natural order of things” than by condemning “hateful rhetoric that leads to violence,” as Hawley put it? What better way than by outlawing what people say and how people say it in schools in the name of protecting kids against the brainwashing and indoctrination of “woke” teachers?
The government isn’t for helping people.
It’s for controlling people.
READ MORE: Bethany Mandel and the makebelievers
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There’s a dirty trick many employers use to keep workers from getting a better job.
Some 30 million Americans are trapped by contracts that say if they leave their current job, they can’t work for a rival company or start a new business of their own.
These are called non-compete agreements.
They block workers from seeing higher wages or better working conditions. And they enlarge corporate monopoly power by stifling competition.
But a sweeping new rule from the Federal Trade Commission would put a stop to these non-compete agreements.
The FTC estimates that banning them could increase wages by nearly $300 billion a year overall by allowing workers to pursue better job opportunities.
But non-competes aren’t just bad for workers. They also harm the economy as a whole by depriving growing businesses of the talent and experience they need to build and expand.
Experts argue California’s ban on non-competes was a major reason for Silicon Valley’s boom.
For several decades, non-compete agreements have been cropping up all over the economy — not just in high-paying fields like banking and tech but as standard boilerplate for employment contracts in many lower-wage sectors such as construction, hospitality, and retail.
A recent survey found that non-competes are used for workers in more than a quarter of jobs where the typical employee only has a high school diploma. Another found that they disproportionately impact women and people of color.
Employers say they need noncompete agreements to protect trade secrets and investments they put into growing their businesses, like training workers.
Rubbish. Employers in states that already ban these agreements (such as California) show no sign of being more reluctant to invest in their businesses or train workers.
The real purpose of noncompetes is to make it harder (or impossible) for workers to bargain with rival employers for better pay or working conditions. Workers in states that have banned non-compete agreements have seen larger wage increases and more job mobility than workers in states where they are still legal.
As we learn again and again, the economy needs guardrails — and workers deserve protection. Otherwise, unfettered greed will lead to monopolies that charge high prices and suppress wages.
America once understood the importance of fighting monopolies. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914 to protect the public against the powerful corporate monopolies that fueled unprecedented inequality and political corruption.
In 1976, when I ran the policy planning staff at the FTC, it began cracking down on corporations under its then assertive chairman, Michael Pertschuk.
Corporate lobbyists and their allies in Congress were so unhappy they tried to choke off the agency’s funding, briefly closing it down. Pertschuk didn’t relent, but eventually he (and I) were replaced by Ronald Reagan’s appointees, who promptly defanged the agency.
Now, under its new Biden-appointed chair, Lina Khan, the FTC is back. Its ban on non-compete agreements nationwide marks the first time since Pertschuk that the agency has flexed its muscle to issue a rule prohibiting an unfair method of competition.
The rule is hardly a sure thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the radical-right Republicans, now in control of the House, tried to pull off a stunt similar to what the House tried in the late 70s. And corporations are sure to appeal the rule all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, kudos to Lina Khan and the FTC for protecting American workers from the unfettered greed of corporate America.
This One Thing Would Increase Wages By $300 Billion | Robert Reich youtu.be
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