4.

I would really like to be able to say that I play an instrument, but that simply isn't a talent I have... and yet, despite this, I love music. I have actually wondered if the emotions I frequently feel when listening to a specific song are similar to the emotions many folks feel when attending a church service. Alas, I'll probably never know. I can share this, though: Each time I listen to Dispatch's song "Dear Congress, (17)," I am absolutely gutted.

If you watch the video and listen to the numbers listed at the end -- 26 ... 58 ... 49 ... 14 ... 12 ... 27 ... 13 ... 32 -- you'll realize that those numbers represent lives lost in school shootings across our nation. For a time, when Dispatch performed this song live, they'd tack more numbers onto the end... until those numbers became too many too list.

Today, the number 4 would be added to the end of that very, very long list.

You know, there was a time in my teaching career when a shooting like today's -- no matter where it occurred, near or far -- would have warranted an immediate email at my school. The news would have been a talking point among students and teachers; kids would have stopped doing their classwork to Google what was happening in Georgia.

I didn't learn of the shooting until I was checking my cell phone while waiting in line at the grocery store after school... and then only because my friend Kathy, whose friend used to be the principal at that school, texted to share all of the mixed-up emotions that she has been feeling all afternoon.

"Mixed up?" you might be wondering. "How mixed up can a person's emotions be about a school shooting?"

Well, let me just tell you: A person's emotions can be VERY mixed up when that person is in the middle of Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes, a novel about a school shooting, and then a friend's daughter is involved in an actual school shooting. That has been Kathy's life today. I can only imagine that she's rapidly ricocheting back and forth between anger and sorrow, tears and huge sighs of relief.

On top of the violence pandemic that is sweeping through our schools, there is also the censorship pandemic that seems to have a hold on our nation as well. In direct correspondence that I recently had with Jodi Picoult, whose book Nineteen Minutes is frequently challenged and banned from school libraries, she said, and I quote, "I have spoken out at countless schools across this country and have received thousands of letters and emails and there have been hundreds -- HUNDREDS -- of kids who said that Nineteen Minutes was the reason they DIDN'T bring a gun to school and start shooting. Instead, the novel made them realize they weren't the only ones who felt so isolated."

I get chills every time I read that line.

Just recently, my mom had me read an article about Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian who was accused of "indoctrinating our children with perversion + pedophilia grooming." She was accused of stocking her school's library shelves with porn. Anonymous community members not only sent threats against her career... but also against her life. Jones, however, knew that the titles more frequently at risk of being banned "almost always targeted LGBTQIA+ stories." And sadly, Jones taught students who were members of the LGBTQIA+ community who later took their own lives. In the article I read, she says, "I'll be damned if I'm going to stand in silence while we lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less."

So my question is this: Why are we censoring materials that might benefit children? Why are we failing, again and again and again, to recognize that America has a major problem? Why are we not doing what needs to be done to help our kids?

There are so many musicians and authors and artists who are putting things into the world that should be embraced rather than purged... but I think the people in charge are afraid to acknowledge the issue. And I don't blame them, necessarily -- it's beyond scary -- but something needs to change.

Though it's not the best photograph of this artwork, this is a piece I created after listening to Dispatch's "Dear Congress, (17)." If you look really closely, you can see the numbers listed vertically along the right-hand side of the canvas. And in the background, you can see The 2nd Amendment. I am not someone who is completely opposed to guns, and I understand the whole "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. But music and books and art don't kill people either... so why are we spending more energy censoring songs and stories and pictures than we are on censoring assault rifles?