Sometimes, the sounds we don’t hear are the loudest of all.
On the security camera footage from Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, there are two things we hear and one thing we don’t.
We hear the sound of law enforcement officers gathering in the hallway, talking, even yelling at each other as they studiously avoid breaching the classroom where a mass murderer is busy killing children and their teachers.
We hear the sound of the killer’s instrument firing rounds intended for the battlefield into the bodies of babies.
It’s a sound we will hear sporadically for nearly an hour after police enter the building — while they wait, sanitizing their hands, positioning themselves in the hall, and doing anything other than the job they’ve been paid to do.
But we don’t hear the screams of the children being slaughtered.
The Austin American-Statesman, which posted the video on its website, removed those in deference to the parents of the dead.
It is a literal silence of the lambs.
And despite being inaudible, it is ear-splitting.
That’s the text that flashes atop the video when the shooting starts, inserted there by the Austin paper, ensuring that we know precisely what we’re missing.
And what we’re missing are the wails of fourth graders whom law enforcement is busy sacrificing so as to keep themselves safe.
Because as any cop will tell you, proudly and without reservation: their primary job is to make it home alive every day.
Not to serve and protect others, whatever the words on the side of the car may say, but to serve and protect themselves, first.
Blue Lives Matter more, after all.
While I can respect the choice to edit out the screams in this instance, it strikes me that the decision eerily mirrors a common tendency in our culture.
Removing children’s screams from our consciousness is, metaphorically speaking — and even literally — something we’ve done for a long time.
- We removed their screams from our consciousness when stealing and selling Black children away from their parents and forcing them to work in the fields from dawn to dusk.
- We removed the screams from our consciousness when we sent Indigenous children to boarding schools to “kill the Indian and save the man” or massacred them in places like Sand Creek along with their mothers and fathers.
- We removed the screams from our consciousness when making children work in dangerous mines or factories to build the wealth of industrialists.
We numbed ourselves to all these screams and more, blocking them out to keep the fantasy alive — the fantasy of liberty and justice for all and the fantasy that America was the greatest nation on Earth.
We’ve been editing out the screams of children for so long that it has become almost a reflex, not unlike the way your leg kicks when the doctor strikes it with that little hammer thing.
One in seven children in the U.S. (and one in five kids of color) are poor, with half of these living in extreme poverty — less than $13,000 annually for a family of four.
Some will eat lead paint chips from the walls of old apartment buildings, lured by the sweet taste.
Some will fall down elevator shafts when building managers and city officials refuse to repair the machinery.
Or perhaps they’ll wedge teddy bears between tree limbs to represent other children who have died from violence or neglect — as Jonathan Kozol noticed in the South Bronx when researching his book, Amazing Grace.
But the noise-canceling headphones we’ve worn for generations ensure we needn’t hear the cries of any of these children or their families.
We can just keep backpacking across the world, taking cool photos for the ‘gram, writing blog posts about living one’s best life, and lecturing others who write about important shit by reminding them how much worse off kids are in the rest of the world.
Even though that’s not remotely relevant and not exactly true.
It’s not relevant because all suffering is relative.
The fact that there are kids in desperately impoverished nations living on less than a dollar a day doesn’t change the fact that suffering here is genuine and deserves our attention.
Poverty amid plenty, after all, is particularly mocking of those who experience it. It serves as a constant reminder of one’s inferiority and irrelevance in the eyes of the beautiful people.
At least in places where virtually everyone is struggling, they all know they’re in it together.
No one tries to set you on fire for being homeless in a nation where starvation and malaria are commonplace.
That’s something we do here because we don’t just abide poverty; we hate poor people for experiencing it.
Not to mention, saying that the marginalized here have it good compared to elsewhere leads to some particularly repellent places, historically speaking.
It would suggest that Black people in Jim Crow America at the turn of the 20th century had nothing to complain about — after all, there were 10 million Blacks in the Belgian Congo being worked to death by King Leopold.
So at least the Black folks of Birmingham weren’t them, amirite?
No, you’re not, but thanks for playing, bruh.
Further, the idea that people elsewhere have it worse isn’t even accurate, at least not in the way most believe
Our children are actually quite a bit worse off than many kids elsewhere, with the United States ranking 36th out of 38 advanced nations in child poverty — meaning the third worst in that regard.
But not only do we not hear the screams of those children, we can’t even grasp that data because it makes no sense to us.
After all, America is number one!
Which is accurate in one category at least — the rate at which children are killed by guns. Among wealthy nations, we have everyone beat when it comes to that one.
Congrats, us.
And when it comes to this best-in-show ranking, we have certainly removed the screams of children, not just in the Uvalde security video but in school after school and neighborhood after neighborhood.
Because we love our guns more than we love our children.
And we believe that the right of adults to own them is more sacred than the right of children to become adults in the first place.
Perhaps you think the Austin paper made a reasonable decision to edit out the screams of those children in Uvalde. I suppose it’s understandable, especially if that was the wish of the families of those killed.
But at some point, we’ll have to learn to hear the screams.
We’ll have to learn how to register pain and anguish rather than denying it, running from it, or trying to cover it up with platitudes about how much we care and how “devastated” we are by the constant losses.
We are not devastated.
Not yet.
If we were, we’d stop creating screamers.
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This post was previously published on An Injustice!.
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