What We Are Losing

On Thursday afternoon, I was working from home and trying to finish up some end-of-the-week things so I could log off. I became slightly annoyed in the way adults trying to finish busywork do because I had to go answer the door. My 15-year-old son answered the doorbell and told me someone wanted to talk with us.

It was a young teenage boy, not much older than my son, in a white shirt and black tie, who politely introduced himself as a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints and asked if we’d be interested in attending service at his church in Grand Blanc on Sunday. He was with a group of others knocking on doors in my neighborhood. We had a quick, pleasant chat. I politely declined his church offer but thanked him, and thought it was nice to see people out walking in the neighborhood and introducing themselves. It was especially nice to see people from the suburbs walking around and knocking on doors in Flint, a place that many outsiders are irrationally fearful of. 

It was one of those interactions that we all have on a daily basis that we don’t really think about much beyond that brief moment when they happen. Except now I am spiraling, consumed with thoughts of hoping that kid is OK and also knowing that even if he’s “OK” things will never really be “OK” again for anyone who was inside the Grand Blanc Church of Latter-day Saints on Sunday. 

No Time to Properly Grieve

Last year while teaching a public speaking course at Mott Community College, one of my students was a survivor of the Oxford High School shooting in 2021. She gave a moving speech in class about her constant effort to overcome the unimaginable trauma associated with that nightmare and her years of reliving it in her mind. It was at odds with her strong desire for people to not define her or associate her with the worst thing she’d ever had to live through. She often felt like, despite her efforts to show her other talents and elements of her personality, when people found out she was an Oxford survivor, they could only see her one way. 

I think about these traumas a lot and the impact it is having on our kids. I’ve taught for five years, and nearly every class has had at least one and sometimes multiple students with stories about violence. I had a student from Lapeer whose family member was murdered in a road rage incident there. I’ve had students from Flint who have lost young friends to gun violence, sometimes just as bystanders in incidents they had no connection to. I’ve taught students in a prison in Lapeer County who have spoken about awful mistakes they made when they were young men or even still teenagers and they’ve spent the rest of their lives trying to reckon with the harm they caused. 

Even when the worst doesn’t happen, the constant threat of violence is so ingrained in our daily existence we almost don’t notice it. A bomb threat caused my son’s high school to be evacuated last year. They had to be bussed to a location a mile away, wait in lines to get on buses, wait in lines to get into the safe location, and their parents or guardians had to wait in lines to be able to make sure their kids were OK. A few hours later, the kids were reunited with their parents, the threat was a hoax, and no one was hurt. I barely had a chance to talk to my kid about it and make sure he was doing alright because I just had to take him to his art class that we were running late for. And that’s obviously the best-case outcome in a situation like that, but it still continues to chip away at our ability to feel safe in some of the most sacred spaces we spend our time in – churches, schools, community events. 

Once-in-a-lifetime types of tragedies occur almost daily now. The way we grieve has changed so dramatically as a result – acts of violence and losses that would typically take a generation to reckon with are so commonplace now that we can’t even properly grieve one until we’re faced with another, and expected to go back to our daily lives and routines without being constantly preoccupied by the thought that a lunatic with easy access to a gun could always attack innocent people. 

Some of us are old enough to remember a time when it didn’t feel that way, when mass shootings weren’t a regular occurrence and threat. Our kids don’t know that world. They’ve grown up with active shooter drills, with lockdowns, and increasingly, direct connections to people who have been in environments with real threats or actual violent acts carried out. It’s not normal and yet it is almost discussed as if it is normal. I don’t think we as a culture have fully reckoned with the long-term implications of what that is doing to the mental health of entire generations of young people.

Community is Still the Answer

I believe in community. I launched this publication in large part because I believe that we as people have the ability to bridge large gaps, to understand each other, to reconstitute and rebuild community in an era that seems increasingly disconnected and isolated. But my faith is not unwavering. 

There’s a person in my life who I wouldn’t exactly call a friend, but someone I’ve spent a lot of time with and respect. I’ve had pleasant interactions with him. He’s helped my daughter out with some basketball stuff that is beyond my expertise to teach and I’m grateful for it. He’s always struck me as a kind, well-meaning person. He’s also had some recent social media posts that are so unnerving, insinuating his belief in a coming holy war with people whose religious beliefs don’t align with his, that I’ve been dreading how I’ll even interact the next time I run into him. Things like that shake my trust, make me want to retreat and become a hermit, and make me really feel naive and stupid for constantly beating the “let’s all get to know each other!” drum. 

But I won’t retreat from it. In fact, members of the very church that was attacked today were a perfect example of community in action. They had people wandering around a Flint neighborhood politely inviting us into their world. I heard separately from two friends today, who are not Mormon, who had lengthy histories of hooping in the gym at that church because the members there were community-minded, opened their space to anyone, and actually made genuine efforts to get to know the people who visited and played there even if they were different from them. Both friends were completely distraught imagining who could do this to the kind people they met there while playing.

There’s an easy explanation for this type of violence, but not an easy answer for stopping it. Explaining why it happens here and elsewhere is simple: deeply disturbed and devoid of love people combined with way-too-easy access to guns. Solving it requires political will and courage, and I am not sure we have much of that at most levels of government at the moment. 

But I do know that transformational efforts that improve our lives and keep us safer rarely ever start from the government. It starts from community, from connection, and from love. That’s our power. Even in the face of evil and tragedy today, law enforcement and first responders from multiple agencies were immediately on the scene and contained the threat from the gunman so that victims could be helped. In a press conference tonight, Grand Blanc Township Chief of Police William Renye recounted the heroic way people inside the church looked out for and protected each other. Nurses at Henry Ford Genesys Hospital, who are currently on strike nearby, immediately went to the hospital to try and help (Genesys turned them away). They also changed their signs along the picket line to focus on support for the victims. 

We want strong communities. We want to help people. We want to take care of each other. Those are shared human characteristics that most of us have and transcend political allegiances, religious affiliations, and other divides. Above all, we need to grieve and remember the unfathomable loss our entire community suffered today, and lift up those who were most impacted in any ways we can. Our thoughts are with every victim and their loved ones today.