Rain was forecast for Tuesday night. That’s been a constant this spring.
Whenever we got into the fields, it was only for a short time before the next rain. So, Tuesday was a 16-hour planting day for me. That was 16 hours with an apple and a muffin and a thermos of water. It’s late May and time for lollygagging has been compressed out of this planting season.
The second half of Tuesday was that – another shooting. It felt oddly commonplace, flipping stations for updates: how many dead, what do we know about the shooter, any connection between the shooter and the shot?
It is, of course, commonplace. By now, every one of us knows the emotional path we will take. On a tractor, as long as the planter monitor doesn’t sound an alarm and I’m staring at that marker trench in the dirt in front of me, there is ample space for emotions in the cab. Overwhelming sadness and anger rush to take up most of the space in my head, with frustration, confusion, and rage filling in air pockets.
You, like me, probably take a mental walk down the empathy path.
What does it feel like to be the friend or relative of a victim?
This is difficult enough and can lead to tears if done well. Empathy is a valuable skill for the members of our race to have, essential to a well-functioning society I would say.
But what does it feel like to be a parent of a dead child?
If you are a parent, you can get a small sense of the blow to the gut that would be by thinking of your own children. But it is literally beyond comprehending. It would be a sadness and emptiness that we do not have words for. Nothing I can write here could describe that. No writer in the world could.
On Wednesday morning, I woke, and yesterday’s news came into my head.
What would it be like to wake the morning after losing your child?
Then I thought, you wouldn’t have slept anyway if you were that parent.
How do you ever fall asleep again?
The hole in you would be deep and permanent.
Back to the tractor radio, as darkness fell and my world shrunk to what the tractor lights illuminated, two reporters from the BBC asked a quite logical question: why does this keep happening in the United States of America and nowhere else?
I thought about the humor website The Onion. Every time one of these shootings occurs, they post the same headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
We like to think of the United States as “exceptional.” I guess we’re right.
At least I don’t delude myself anymore. Nothing will change and, in a few weeks or months, I will be on the tractor feeling all these emotions again.
Maybe it won’t be small children in a school. Maybe it will be Blacks or Jews or Hispanics. As difficult as those are, it’s easier seeing adults than dead school kids lying in pools of blood in my mind’s eye.
A reporter said that the young bodies are torn apart by bullets from an automatic rifle, no clean shot to the heart. Then, the parents must identify their child.
Can you imagine that?
No. We can’t.
How come no one goes and shoots up a nursing home?
It might be easier to accept the senseless death of old people who’ve lived a life, rather than kids who are having theirs snatched away from them.
I admire and appreciate that people close to the dead will insist there be change. God bless them. Since your loved one is dead for no known reason, I can see how one would want some small bit of useful good to come from that mindless evil. God bless them, but it won’t matter.
According to polls, a large majority of Americans agree on a number of common-sense limits to guns. It doesn’t matter. Nothing will change. The large majority of Americans can go to hell.
I could use this space to report that the United States has more guns per capita than every nation on Earth except for Syria and Libya. Or that the number of suicides by bullet and accidental shootings have grown perfectly in step with the proliferation of handguns in the last 20 years. Or I could restate the simple fact that if you are carrying a gun, you are more likely to be killed by gunfire than if you are unarmed.
I guess I just wrote those. But it was a waste of my time and yours. Sorry.
On the tractor radio, the last weeks have been filled with ads for candidates who want to fill the empty congressional seat. Most include a line about protecting our Second Amendment rights. If I had just flown here from the last century, I would have assumed they were referring to guns used for hunting. No one has ever talked about limits on those.
Can I be clearer about that?
NO ONE has ever tried to take legitimate hunting guns away.
That was so last century. Now, by “Second Amendment rights,” we mean that there can be no limits on guns of any kind. None. And if a confused 18-year-old boy wants to buy an assault rifle, damn it, he can. Because this is America, and that right is greater than the rights of nineteen children in a small town in Texas to live.
Don’t ask whether we value guns more than children. That’s a trick question. We know the answer.
Farmers like predictability. I like putting the seed in the ground, knowing the sun will shine, the rain will fall, and I will harvest in the fall. I like to think my machines will work.
Some predictable things aren’t so good. I know sometime soon, I will be on a tractor punching buttons, racing about finding news about the next shooting in America.
That’s actually more predictable than my crops growing or my machines working. Because there is nothing we can do about it.
You’d think this great country could do better. You’re wrong. We can’t.
– Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye where he lives with his wife, Pam.