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Nearly everything about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, is so depressingly familiar. The grieving parents. The stone-faced cops. The overwhelming feeling of senselessness. The fear.
The killer is also familiar to the point of stereotype. Once again we are looking at a lost young man alienated from purpose and meaning, an 18-year-old overly immersed in video games and the online world who was advertising his evil to anyone who paid attention.
Rage rises in me when I think about him and his massacre of 19 elementary-schoolers and two teachers. What a misanthropic loser he was. What a waste of space. How dare he take out his frustrations, his weakness, on innocent children. Unable or unwilling to build a life of his own, he chose the lazy path of destruction. How pathetic.
Because of him, there were 19 empty beds this morning where children should have been sleeping. There were flowers left unpicked and balls left unkicked. There were holes in the hearts of parents and grandparents who would give anything for one last hug, for one last chance to offer their love.
There's no making sense of this. I can't even try.
But we should try to acknowledge the bigger picture, including the terrible sickness out there. While it's easy to paint with too broad a brush at moments like this, it's undeniable that this country is leaving too many teenagers behind and producing too many young men willing to carry out heinous massacres. It feels like a spiritual decay.