TW @: Uvalde School Shooting 5/24/22

[underwaterrhymes]

I hate everything.

[underwaterrhymes]

I shared this on Facebook today. It moved me.


Brendan Constantine
The Opposites Game
for Patricia Maisch

This day my students and I play the Opposites Game
with a line from Emily Dickinson. My life had stood
a loaded gun, it goes and I write it on the board,
pausing so they can call out the antonyms –

My                            Your
Life                           Death
Had stood ?               Will sit
A                              Many
Loaded                      Empty
Gun ?

Gun.
For a moment, very much like the one between
lightning and it’s sound, the children just stare at me,
and then it comes, a flurry, a hail storm of answers –

Flower, says one. No, Book, says another. That's stupid,
cries a third, the opposite of a gun is a pillow. Or maybe
a hug, but not a book, no way is it a book. With this,
the others gather their thoughts

and suddenly it’s a shouting match. No one can agree,
for every student there’s a final answer. It's a song,
a prayer, I mean a promise, like a wedding ring, and
later a baby. Or what’s that person who delivers babies?

A midwife? Yes, a midwife. No, that’s wrong. You're so
wrong you’ll never be right again. It's a whisper, a star,
it's saying I love you into your hand and then touching
someone's ear. Are you crazy? Are you the president

of Stupid-land? You should be, When's the election?
It’s a teddy bear, a sword, a perfect, perfect peach.
Go back to the first one, it's a flower, a white rose.
When the bell rings, I reach for an eraser but a girl

snatches it from my hand. Nothing's decided, she says,
We’re not done here. I leave all the answers
on the board. The next day some of them have
stopped talking to each other, they’ve taken sides.

There's a Flower club. And a Kitten club. And two boys
calling themselves The Snowballs. The rest have stuck
with the original game, which was to try to write
something like poetry.

It's a diamond, it's a dance,
the opposite of a gun is a museum in France.
It's the moon, it's a mirror,
it's the sound of a bell and the hearer.

The arguing starts again, more shouting, and finally
a new club. For the first time I dare to push them.
Maybe all of you are right, I say.

Well, maybe. Maybe it's everything we said. Maybe it’s
everything we didn't say. It's words and the spaces for words.
They're looking at each other now. It's everything in this room
and outside this room and down the street and in the sky.

It's everyone on campus and at the mall, and all the people
waiting at the hospital. And at the post office. And, yeah,
it's a flower, too. All the flowers. The whole garden.
The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it.

Don’t write that on the board, they say. Just say poem.
Your death will sit through many empty poems.

[TamiTaylor]

NRA convention still happening but there is an email campaign going to the Chairman of the Board of the convention center to cancel the convention. If you click on the link below it will auto populate an email to him.

tinyurl.com/canceltheconvention

[sonrisa]

May 26, 2022 12:11:25 GMT -5 underwaterrhymes said:

I shared this on Facebook today. It moved me.


Brendan Constantine
The Opposites Game
for Patricia Maisch

This day my students and I play the Opposites Game
with a line from Emily Dickinson. My life had stood
a loaded gun, it goes and I write it on the board,
pausing so they can call out the antonyms –

My                            Your
Life                           Death
Had stood ?               Will sit
A                              Many
Loaded                      Empty
Gun ?

Gun.
For a moment, very much like the one between
lightning and it’s sound, the children just stare at me,
and then it comes, a flurry, a hail storm of answers –

Flower, says one. No, Book, says another. That's stupid,
cries a third, the opposite of a gun is a pillow. Or maybe
a hug, but not a book, no way is it a book. With this,
the others gather their thoughts

and suddenly it’s a shouting match. No one can agree,
for every student there’s a final answer. It's a song,
a prayer, I mean a promise, like a wedding ring, and
later a baby. Or what’s that person who delivers babies?

A midwife? Yes, a midwife. No, that’s wrong. You're so
wrong you’ll never be right again. It's a whisper, a star,
it's saying I love you into your hand and then touching
someone's ear. Are you crazy? Are you the president

of Stupid-land? You should be, When's the election?
It’s a teddy bear, a sword, a perfect, perfect peach.
Go back to the first one, it's a flower, a white rose.
When the bell rings, I reach for an eraser but a girl

snatches it from my hand. Nothing's decided, she says,
We’re not done here. I leave all the answers
on the board. The next day some of them have
stopped talking to each other, they’ve taken sides.

There's a Flower club. And a Kitten club. And two boys
calling themselves The Snowballs. The rest have stuck
with the original game, which was to try to write
something like poetry.

It's a diamond, it's a dance,
the opposite of a gun is a museum in France.
It's the moon, it's a mirror,
it's the sound of a bell and the hearer.

The arguing starts again, more shouting, and finally
a new club. For the first time I dare to push them.
Maybe all of you are right, I say.

Well, maybe. Maybe it's everything we said. Maybe it’s
everything we didn't say. It's words and the spaces for words.
They're looking at each other now. It's everything in this room
and outside this room and down the street and in the sky.

It's everyone on campus and at the mall, and all the people
waiting at the hospital. And at the post office. And, yeah,
it's a flower, too. All the flowers. The whole garden.
The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it.

Don’t write that on the board, they say. Just say poem.
Your death will sit through many empty poems.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf5t_uhZlEQ

The poet reading it

[heat40]

Omg. The husband of one of the teachers killed, has suffered a fatal heart attack. This is all so horrible. Every single detail makes it worse and worse. My God.

[pugz]

May 26, 2022 12:42:36 GMT -5 heat40 said:

Omg. The husband of one of the teachers killed, has suffered a fatal heart attack. This is all so horrible. Every single detail makes it worse and worse. My God.

Nonono!

[Pilsy]

My God. Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse.

[suburbanzookeeper]

Echoing a bit of what melmaria said, my husband and I both have done these. But what @ajl is absolutely accurate and was what we were told and taught. If LEO doesn't think it's safe for them to engage, they don't have to... even if its in a school. A nursery. A hospital. They don't have to engage and are not required to.

LEO took their kids out of the school during that hour. EMTs found out while treating another child that their child was killed.

There are a whole lot of missing points in this story.

[lea]

It took 5 minutes after receiving an emergency call for a cop to enter the building at Sandy Hook. The shooter took his own life so I don’t know what would have happened had he attempted a shootout with law enforcement but I don’t think they would have spent 40 minutes standing around outside.

[suburbanzookeeper]

This press conference is... not helping.

Texas Police is saying he was unobstructed when he entered the building, that there was no school resource officer. Police responded 4 minutes after he entered the building.

[wanderingback]

May 26, 2022 11:55:38 GMT -5 missva said:

May 26, 2022 11:50:21 GMT -5 wanderingback said:

This is unrelated but Shaun King is a piece of trash and fraudster and I urge you to get your news information from a more legit and credible source.

Good to know.  (He's not my news source - this issue is widely reported, he was just the only one I saw with videos.)

Got it.
Sorry to derail the thread. Just saying you shouldn’t follow him (not sure how else you would see things he reported) and shouldn’t share info about stuff he says. He is not ok.

[Velar Fricative]

The updates are just getting worse and worse despite each of them being horrifying.

[heat40]

I am livid with the updates. So many discrepancies. And then reading about how the parents were treated…I don’t know. Just this shit isn’t right.

ETA: this shit right here has me fuming. A mom put in handcuffs because she was urging police to do something.

[NewOrleans]

So they were manhandling the parents and preparing to tase them?

Video
www.newsweek.com/texas-police-stopped-parents-rushing-save-children-shooter-1710325?amp=1

[bernsteincat]

Another thing very confusing to me… it was 12 minutes between his crash and entering the school. The update said that when he got out of his vehicle, he almost immediately began shooting at people at a funeral home near the school, and 911 was called. So in that 10 minutes, while he was walking towards the school, firing at bystanders, and climbing the fence, there was NO POLICE around to take this guy out? Do I have that right?

[mcsangel2]

There is a lot here that doesn't make sense. I'm seeing a lot of people on Twitter accusing the officials of trying to cover up something, and I have to say I agree.

[suburbanzookeeper]

May 26, 2022 14:21:55 GMT -5 bernsteincat said:

Another thing very confusing to me… it was 12 minutes between his crash and entering the school. The update said that when he got out of his vehicle, he almost immediately began shooting at people at a funeral home near the school, and 911 was called. So in that 10 minutes, while he was walking towards the school, firing at bystanders, and climbing the fence, there was NO POLICE around to take this guy out? Do I have that right?

They also said police were on the location 4 miles after 911 was called. None of it adds up. None it makes sense.

The police were totally fine with tasing, pepper spraying, and detaining parents who were beginning for them to *do something* while an armed gunman was on campus with their children.

We keep putting militarized style weapons and support pieces into our local PDs and it took a Border Patrol team to take out the gunman well after he was barricaded in with students (I mean, would improving doors had made that worse? He missed a table with children hiding underneath who he couldn't see because of a tablecloth. They heard/saw everything.

Was it deemed OK to let him just kill through the room and they'd eventually get him (or he'd kill himself)?

[Deleted]

May 26, 2022 14:27:46 GMT -5 suburbanzookeeper said:

May 26, 2022 14:21:55 GMT -5 bernsteincat said:

Another thing very confusing to me… it was 12 minutes between his crash and entering the school. The update said that when he got out of his vehicle, he almost immediately began shooting at people at a funeral home near the school, and 911 was called. So in that 10 minutes, while he was walking towards the school, firing at bystanders, and climbing the fence, there was NO POLICE around to take this guy out? Do I have that right?

They also said police were on the location 4 miles after 911 was called. None of it adds up. None it makes sense.

The police were totally fine with tasing, pepper spraying, and detaining parents who were beginning for them to *do something* while an armed gunman was on campus with their children.

We keep putting militarized style weapons and support pieces into our local PDs and it took a Border Patrol team to take out the gunman well after he was barricaded in with students (I mean, would improving doors had made that worse? He missed a table with children hiding underneath who he couldn't see because of a tablecloth. They heard/saw everything.

Was it deemed OK to let him just kill through the room and they'd eventually get him (or he'd kill himself)?

I keep seeing a quote from someone in law enforcement talking about how they kept him contained to a room, so I think that was their strategy. They weren't going in and felt they could just keep him there and let him decimate that one room. 

[cous0226]

May 26, 2022 14:25:43 GMT -5 mcsangel2 said:

There is a lot here that doesn't make sense. I'm seeing a lot of people on Twitter accusing the officials of trying to cover up something, and I have to say I agree.

Yeah there are too many stories going around. Yesterday they said someone was at the door where he entered and they didn’t engage him. Today I heard no one was there and he walked right in.

[pixy0stix]

Is there any place where I can look at the bullet points of the case with revelations from today without reading the personal stories?

[bronxgirl]

I’m trying to just stick to one news source to try to avoid rumors/confusion, but it’s still all over the place. Each new revelation is worse than the last.

[Pilsy]

I saw the fund publicized on the school website. Does anyone know if there are verified GoFundMes for the the victims' funerals, too?

[Patsy Baloney]

May 26, 2022 14:45:26 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Is there any place where I can look at the bullet points of the case with revelations from today without reading the personal stories?

Honestly, I feel like Wikipedia is probably the place to go for this. It will, of course, change, but it’s very matter-of-fact and has the links out to supporting articles.

[Mrs. Meerkat]

May 26, 2022 15:00:03 GMT -5 Pilsy said:

I saw the fund publicized on the school website. Does anyone know if there are verified GoFundMes for the the victims' funerals, too?

Lurker here, but I read that the two funeral homes in/near Uvalde are providing services at no charge to the families affected. Let me find a link.

ETA: www.statesman.com/story/news/2022/05/25/uvalde-funeral-homes-offering-free-service-after-shooting/9927569002/

[suburbanzookeeper]

May 26, 2022 14:45:26 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Is there any place where I can look at the bullet points of the case with revelations from today without reading the personal stories?

Forbes seems to have a decent one but it's a few hours old: www.forbes.com/sites/annakaplan/2022/05/26/uvalde-shooting-timeline-heres-what-we-know-about-what-happened/

[NewOrleans]

May 26, 2022 14:31:07 GMT -5 @rebeccawelton said:

May 26, 2022 14:27:46 GMT -5 suburbanzookeeper said:

They also said police were on the location 4 miles after 911 was called. None of it adds up. None it makes sense.

The police were totally fine with tasing, pepper spraying, and detaining parents who were beginning for them to *do something* while an armed gunman was on campus with their children.

We keep putting militarized style weapons and support pieces into our local PDs and it took a Border Patrol team to take out the gunman well after he was barricaded in with students (I mean, would improving doors had made that worse? He missed a table with children hiding underneath who he couldn't see because of a tablecloth. They heard/saw everything.

Was it deemed OK to let him just kill through the room and they'd eventually get him (or he'd kill himself)?

I keep seeing a quote from someone in law enforcement talking about how they kept him contained to a room, so I think that was their strategy. They weren't going in and felt they could just keep him there and let him decimate that one room. 

Except that the room had a door adjoining it to the next room so he could have continued

[Pilsy]

May 26, 2022 15:15:21 GMT -5 NewOrleans said:

May 26, 2022 14:31:07 GMT -5 @rebeccawelton said:

I keep seeing a quote from someone in law enforcement talking about how they kept him contained to a room, so I think that was their strategy. They weren't going in and felt they could just keep him there and let him decimate that one room. 

Except that the room had a door adjoining it to the next room so he could have continued

Andplusalso, not to be Captain Obvious, but maybe we would expect the police to intervene and defend these helpless children. 

No snark intended toward you, NewOrleans, or anyone else here. I just can't fathom approving this "strategy." 

[Deleted]

May 26, 2022 15:25:33 GMT -5 Pilsy said:

May 26, 2022 15:15:21 GMT -5 NewOrleans said:

Except that the room had a door adjoining it to the next room so he could have continued

Andplusalso, not to be Captain Obvious, but maybe we would expect the police to intervene and defend these helpless children. 

No snark intended toward you, NewOrleans , or anyone else here. I just can't fathom approving this "strategy." 

I absolutely agree. I can't even begin imagine sitting outside, hearing the gunshots and thinking that it was the best course of action. Meanwhile parents are hurling themselves through windows to try to do something. 

[1confused1]

May 26, 2022 14:45:26 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Is there any place where I can look at the bullet points of the case with revelations from today without reading the personal stories?

Not bullet points, but a summary of what is known so far:

www.cnn.com/2022/05/25/us/uvalde-texas-elementary-school-shooting-what-we-know/index.html

[Deleted]

So….if he was barricaded/locked inside the two adjoining classrooms, then how is it that LEOs couldn’t approach the classroom because he was shooting at them? I can’t picture it. Was there some kind of window in the locked door that he was shooting through?