It’s surely been a dreadful week, hasn’t it? The war in Ukraine continues unabated, with no sign that all the arms we’ve sent the Ukrainian army has repelled the invaders. The stock market can’t seem to make up its mind whether our economy is in the toilet or if happy days are here again. And then there’s the massacre in Texas. A gruesome threesome.

Now that I’ve introduced the big three, I’ll dispense with the update on my paintology stylings at the big box store down the road. I continue there, for those that thought I might have quit already. I am always early for work and stay to the end of the shift. I do a decent job – not great, lord knows I still make mistakes..but given the amount of training I received, I must say I’m certainly contributing to the store’s bottom line.

But there’s a problem in the paint department at Home Depot. There’s a pall over it. Why, you may ask? Well, based on my years of work and living experience, it boils down to one thing: lack of leadership. There is no acknowledged leader of the pack that cares enough about how things go in the paint department to come up with new ideas to improve results. It’s really that simple. I am the newest member, so my ability to lead is only by example, with unparalleled cheerfulness and emphasis on customer service. All that succeeds in doing is, my peers try to emulate that with little success..because they’ve been there so long and know that tomorrow will be the same drag they experience today. They’ve given up. I’m too new and stupid to do that.

But talking about lack of leadership takes me back to the happenings in Texas. A lost soul ironically called Salvador (no savior here) took his misery and inflicted it on the parents, grandparents and other assorted loved ones of nineteen children and two adults. The dead are beyond feeling earthly pain. It’s the survivors of those children who now begin to understand the reality that their children and wives were not as important as the lives of the 19 policemen in the hall outside their room. Is it really nineteen, or is that just a catchy number because of the number of dead children? Who knows…irrelevant. The point is the children and adults in that classroom being gunned down by Salvador Ramos didn’t matter. They were pawns in the game.

Lack of leadership on the part of the Police Chief of the Uvalde School District certainly contributed to this massacre. He was likely a desk jockey..good at the snappy repartee necessary to win promotion, but unskilled and uneasy about stepping up, putting his and other cops’ lives on the line to save children and teachers. He was stuck; frozen in place, making up stories to justify not breaking down the door and stopping this misbegotten kid from murdering more ten-year-olds. Understandable. You never know how you’ll act until the real thing comes along. We know now. He couldn’t and didn’t, and will likely retire after this to a full pension and his bitterness at how his career ended. Not his fault.

Not his fault. When the governor of Texas said he was livid at being ‘misinformed’, he wasn’t livid because 19 children and 2 adults died; he was livid because he was made to look bad – ‘blind-sided’ as it were – before the people of his state who expect him to be a good leader. He isn’t. He never was. Now we know that. And that won’t change.

So the question must be asked: what happens next – for Texas, for the country, for the other children throughout America whose lives are jeopardized every time they cross the threshold of their school? This will happen again. And again. It will be groundhog day times fifty. Why? Because we lack leadership. Genuine, authoritative leadership. Not authoritarian leadership. An individual – or a group – that has a clear sense of themselves and what this country is really about. Until we find that within our ranks – that George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Jean d’Arc – the killing of school children will reoccur.

I wrote Suffer the Children in 2019, about children dying at the hands of their parents caught up in a cycle of fear generated by a cult leader. This leader insisted the children could only go to heaven if their souls were pure. This was based on the leader’s Biblical interpretation of the use of the word ‘Suffer’ in the Book of Matthew. It means to bear from below. He tells the parents this, via podcast shared through Evangelical church members:

“Your children are allowed into heaven now when they are still pure.  But if you wait until the end, they will suffer – bear from below.  And the stain they carry from their parents’ sins will prevent their acceptance into Jesus’ domain.  Don’t let them suffer.  Give them a home in heaven – before it’s too late.”

I had in mind the work of false messiahs like David Koresh at Waco in creating this podcasting character called Judge Dreadbear. Twenty chldren died at Waco, most by being shot. Poor leadership on the part of the government led to an assault on that compound that went very wrong: the inverse of what happened at Uvalde. Waco led to the Oklahoma City bombing, where 19 children died. Gee: one begins to see a pattern here.

Maureen Dowd, columnist for the NY Times, summed it up in today’s contribution. She said, “We’ve become a country of cowards, so terrified of the unholy power of gun worship that no sacrifice of young blood is too great to appease it.” Child sacrifice – as old as civilization itself. Death by gunshot is now the leading cause of child death, replacing auto accidents. Don’t you feel proud, you gun owners? I am disgusted.