As is often the case, my gloomy mood this week was a precursor to getting sick. I don’t know if I get sick because I am experiencing a depression, or if being depressed is a harbinger of something brewing in my system that has yet to be felt. But anyway, I was exceptionally ill with some sort of stomach issue and although I will spare you the grody details, it was the sickest I’ve been in a long time. I am thankfully a bit better now, but still dehydrated and fatigued, with lingering abdominal pain. I’m trying to ease my system back into some semblance of normalcy via the BRAT diet and a lot of hydration.

The big news around here is still the tragic Oxford High shooting and the subsequent drama with the shooter’s parents. They immediately went on the lam and during the haze of my illness Brandon was giving me updates about the situation. This is all occurring in our county and our area schools have been closed due to copycat threats so it hits very close to home.

My opinions of this are as follows:

– the parents are entirely culpable and have blood on their hands; I have nothing but rage for these fucked up Trumper parents who fostered his mental illness, put a weapon and ammunition in his hands, laughed at it and encouraged it and then, when he reaped what they sowed, ran – tried to hide in East Detroit leaving him in prison.

– the gun lobby is a murderous greedy cult and gun laws need to be changed; guns and people kill people and NO ONE NEEDS A SEMI AUTOMATIC WEAPON. Now, I know there are responsible gun owners. I have gun owners in my family and I trust them implicitly because they are absolutely committed to doing what they need to do to be safe and well trained. But now is the time for those responsible gun owners to join the fight and get loud about gun laws and about the fact that this is not okay. They need to not just toe the line quietly because they buy the whole NRA “they’re comin to take our guns” bullshit and they’d rather have people die needlessly than worry that their guns are going to be taken. I don’t want your hunting rifle but I definitely do not want AR-15s in the hands of minors! As Brandon said, these gun nuts think if a kid is killed in Biology class, it’s the 2nd Amendment that is under attack and needs to be protected. There have been 28 school shootings in 2021 and they are not going to stop until gun laws are changed. But I am glad to see that the parents have been charged – this is a positive development. Guns used in school shootings frequently come from the homes of the perpetrators. Clearly many of these people don’t care about the moral and ethical ramifications, so maybe they’ll care about what they expose their children to if they’re held legally responsible for it.

– the school district grievously failed those children; there were so many signs that this kid was a time bomb and they mishandled it to the point of negligence. He never should have been allowed back to class, knowing what they knew about his behavior this week. In addition, I would certainly hope that our superintendent would make a better showing than the Oxford superintendent who seemed to only be interested in defending the bungling rather than being open that something went terribly wrong and it is his obligation (and everyone’s) to understand what that was, take accountability, and do everything possible to keep it from happening again.

We continue to follow this situation closely and hope that our kids can get back to school as normal this week; but “normal” is now a strange and amorphous thing, and maybe does not exist at all anymore.