This is the week we stopped lying to ourselves.

"Do children lowering the flag at an elementary school know it’s for children shot dead at another?"

Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re wondering why we need warning signs to tell us to obey warning signs. This week, best-selling author S.C. Gwynne describes entitlement creep in the wealthier suburbs in Austin, newly repatriated Rachel Megan Barker asks, “Does anyone else just feel weirdly, inescapably bored?”, and pollster Stefan Hankin excoriates how his party responds to race baiting in “Dems are the f***ing worst, part 1.” Also, I take a look at last week’s school shooting.

As always, we recommend things to do (build realistic optimism), read (Dan Zak’s lovely profile of Lorne Michaels), watch (Get Back, Peter Jackson’s documentary series on Disney+), and listen to (NNAMDÏ’s “Art School Crush”).

But first, did you notice the good thing about the latest school shooting?

There is nothing good about what happened at Oxford High School. A boy brought a gun to school and killed four students and wounded seven others, including a teacher. The school had an active shooter plan, guards, and security measures, but a boy not old enough to drive had access to a handgun. He also had parents who would not cooperate with the school administrators when it became clear well ahead of time that this boy was disturbed by his own violent thoughts. The school had no chance without their help. They wouldn’t keep firearms locked away from their disturbed child. The whole thing was over in five minutes.

The good that came out of it was what happened next: No one offered thoughts and prayers. We have achieved acceptance of the nauseating status quo that we’re going to hold schools responsible for keeping guns out. We’re not even going to pretend to go through the motions of proposing anything to make it harder to get guns in the first place.

We’ve convinced ourselves that we are powerless to close the gun show loophole, to make gun owners liable for their deadly weapons, or to do any of the things that a majority of this country wants. Nope. It’s up to assistant principals to beg parents to cooperate when a child is showing red flashing warning signs. It’s up to teachers to barricade the doors to classrooms. It’s up to a child to remain still and breathe silently in a bathroom stall as he hears the unhurried footsteps of a boy walking down the hall, looking for more classmates to shoot.

This is the week we decided to keep the flags at half-staff. This is the week we stopped lying to ourselves.

---

This is the week we decided to keep the flags at half-staff.

---

We have fiction to tell the truth of things that non-fiction can’t achieve. We have poetry to express emotions that prose can’t get reach. And we have Maggie Smith to break our damn hearts.

In 2016, she told us that “the world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate” and that selling the world to our children as flawed but fundamentally sound might be a lie we were telling ourselves. In Goldenrod, Smith takes our hearts in her two hands and snaps them neatly along the cracks left by the last few years.

Leaving the flags at half-staff is not my image. I’m borrowing it with her kind permission from her poem “Half Staff” that has her dropping her kids off on a winter’s day at an elementary school. The poem takes place the day after a school somewhere was unable to keep out the guns that are everywhere.

Why don’t we leave the flags at half-staff & save ourselves the trouble? Save the kids in coats & hats on flag duty in the snow.

As many of you know, I work at the school district here in Austin. This week, my deputy came into my office with her phone pressed to her ear. Something was up. Someone, she said, walked into a high school in Austin with a gun and encountered three students in a bathroom. They told a principal who called our police, and they were looking for that man who walked off the street with a gun.

That isn’t what happened, but that’s what we thought. The officer told us a “subject” was seen with a gun. In fact, a student saw three other students with one gun, but the officer was using cop speak. We heard “subject” and projected our fears onto the situation. My deputy is the mother of an elementary school boy. I graduated two sons through this school district. We are afraid of someone bringing one of the millions of guns in the world into our schools.

Our police found the boys and two magazines (the cartridges with the bullets) but not the gun. No shots were fired. No one was hurt. This was not a school shooting, but there was a gun inside a high school, and for the entire morning we did not know how it would end.

For some reason, this made the London tabloids. People are eager to tell a story about a school shooting in Texas. Some stories are easier to project fears upon, like a giant horrifying silver screen.

That morning I sat in traffic by the school, waiting for the light to change, & there they were, pulling the rope hand-over-hand. First thought: do children lowering the flag at an elementary school know it’s for children shot dead at another? Then the minivan behind me honked. Red to green.

What ends well is not all well. For several hours we had to live with the knowledge that a gun had crossed the transom. And when the danger had passed and the boys apprehended before lunchtime without injury or shots fired, we had to accept that the gun was still unaccounted for. Chekhov never wrote a story as scary as this.

I have to own a mistake here. My team tweeted out a message that at no time were any students in danger. What we meant was that at no time was there any indication that these teenagers intended to shoot anyone at school. No shots were fired and no one was hurt, but we did not use the right words. Of course there was a danger. A gun got into one of our schools.

Sometimes, in dispassionately dealing with the mundane horror of real life, we think we’re trying to becalm frightened parents. But we were lying to ourselves when we told the world that at no time were the students in any danger. The truth was that what happened that day wasn’t the monster we’re all afraid of.

I’m reminded the body is built for ending. How have we not evolved past these temporary containers? What a place to keep everything. everything!

It’s important to use the correct words. When the conservative justices on the Supreme Court began debating the viability of a fetus, Sonia Sotomayor asked, “When does the life of a woman and putting her at risk enter the calculus?” 

Congressman Madison Cawthorn answered her a few days later, calling women “earthen vessels sanctified by almighty God and endowed with the miracle of life are denied their birth.”

Many reacted with horror that a member of congress would refer to women as “earthen vessels,” but Cawthorn was just paraphrasing the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians, the sound of which in my head has been forever debased by Donald Trump: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”

How do you put the correct words to government using a religious text to categorize the majority of our population as breeding stock for whom gestating the progeny of a rapist is not an undue burden? What do you call what is happening without lying to yourself?

Novels exist to help us find those words, but this task is made harder when frightened parents, politicians, and school administrators pull books from library shelves. Earlier this year, a nearby school district took 15 novels off the list of approved titles for student book clubs.

Among them were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Four days after Sandy Hook, I walked my daughter to her classroom, kissed her head, wished her happy birthday & sent her inside.

We debriefed on our crisis communications response to the gun at the high school and decided that when something like this happened again that Eddie, one of our press guys, would automatically go to the school to coordinate on-site press response.

“Is that because I’m single and don’t have kids?” he asked, half-jokingly. “I do have a dog!”

We all laughed, but it was a gallows laugh. I silently catalogued in my head the parents in the room. One has two kids in pre-K, another has two in diapers. That one is taking care of her mother.

We identified a hole in our plan: If we tell the community what we know when we know it, how do we keep parents from showing up at the school before things are safe? Our police are focused on finding the source of danger while parents knock on doors, wanting to pull their children out.

“I don’t think we can convince parents to stay away,” said the one with kids in diapers.

“I mean, I’d go to the school, too, if it were my kids,” said the pre-K parent.

I walked my children to elementary school the day after Sandy Hook. There was a patrol car parked outside to reassure parents, unsuccessfully in my case.

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” said Barack Obama then. “And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would — as a parent.”

That was 2012.

Every day since then I’ve known that if there were an active shooter at my child’s school, I would drop what I’m doing and go get my baby. I would do that even knowing that by doing so I’d give the police one more thing to worry about.

So often the mind whispers to the body, I am not safe here, & the body never bothers to answer. Because what could it say?

Maybe we need to hire a poet to write the messages to parents, because addressing the facts doesn’t assuage the raw, angry fear. Adults have decided we’re not going to do anything about the guns. Somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves of our own powerlessness.

I would like to skip ahead or go back in time. In the future we’ll need poets to remind us how to woo a pretty girl or describe the ecstasy of the drop in “Your Best American Girl.” We’ll need poetry to give us a way to understand feeling safe again.

Or I’d like to go back in time to the first time someone felt comforted by thoughts and prayers after a school shooting. Only a poet could describe the innocence of that soul, like virgin hair that has never been dyed. Imagine holding that shining, healthy hair in your hands, knowing the damage to come.

But right now, we try to find the words to describe the boys with the guns and the loaded magazine. We want to reassure that no shots were fired and that everyone’s OK. But we’re parents, too. We know that thoughts and prayers are worse than not enough. That’s a lie we tell ourselves because no one is going to do anything about the guns. But at least it’s a lie we’re not telling ourselves anymore.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

---

Más

UMC Entitlement Creep

Existentially Bored

Dems are the f***ing worst, part 1

---

How we’re getting through this

Going childless

Becoming a band dad

Building realistic optimism

Visiting “The Art of Banksy”

Wrestling with how to cover Trump

Forgetting the Alamo with Michael Angelo Caruso

---

What I’m reading

Frederic J. Frommer: “The Olympic boycott movement that failed” - Showing up to the Olympics gave Hitler a massive propaganda win.

More than 80 years ago, a wide range of American activists and public figures targeted the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, known today as the “Nazi Olympics.” Politicians, civil rights groups (including the NAACP), college presidents, newspapers, labor organizations and a host of state legislatures and city councils cited Nazi Germany’s ongoing persecution of Jews as justification to skip the Berlin Games.

Ted Norhaus: “Ted Nordhaus on how green activists mislead and hold back progress: Exaggerating and impractical, the climate movement undermines its cause and everyone suffers, says an environmental writer” - Is it possible to be both encouraged by progress and discouraged at the same time? Yes, it really is.

Deaths around the world from climate-related disasters are at an all-time low. People’s vulnerability to extreme weather has fallen rapidly in recent decades. Recent research in Global Environmental Change shows that climate vulnerability has declined the most in recent decades among the poor globally, owing to the resilience that comes with economic growth and development.

Dan Zak: “Lorne Michaels still lives for Saturday night” - Icon

“I think this is as important as anything else, any other art form,” he says of his life’s work. “I won’t want to see it go down. That’s important. On the other hand: 50 years is, for a television show …”

---

What I’m watching

I’m going to write more about this soon, but there’s a lot in Get Back, Peter Jackson’s three-part documentary series on Disney+ about the making of Let It Be.

---

What I’m listening to

We all got our Spotify wraps recently, and friend of The Experiment and social media genius Mac McCann’s top song was the very chill and gentle “Art School Crush” by NNAMDÏ.

My cousins in Philadelphia dropped their first EP as a soul outfit under the name Zumi. I’m adding “Glowing” to the playlist because George Stanford cowrote it.

---

Thanks for reading The Experiment! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds and have kept it off for more than a year. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.

We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment. 

We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some

Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.