Uvalde's Dads
The heartbreak and rage of short-circuited instincts
Spare a thought for the dads in Uvalde, who were blocked on Tuesday.
Via the New York Times this morning:
Parents of students who were trapped inside Robb Elementary during the gunman’s rampage furiously urged police to storm the school sooner, according to a witness account. “They were just angry, especially the dads,” said Derek Sotelo, 26, who heard gunfire from his tire shop nearby and followed it to the school. “We were wondering, ‘What the heck is going on? Are they going in?’ The dads were saying, ‘Give me the vest, I’ll go in there!’”
Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter was killed in the massacre, said that officials have been misrepresenting the response of law enforcement officials during the shooting at Robb Elementary. “They said they rushed in and all that, we didn’t see that,” said Mr. Cazares, 43, who was outside the school during the attack and heard gunshots. Mr. Cazares wanted to rush in himself to help his daughter, Jacklyn. He offered to help the officers, saying he would carry his little girl himself, but they told him to let them do their work. “There were plenty of men out there armed to the teeth that could have gone in faster. This could have been over in a couple minutes.”
I wrote about our culture’s de-evolution in my last post, but I can think of no more of an infuriating example of how much we’ve outstripped our own human instincts and rendered ourselves impotent than what happened in Uvalde on Tuesday.
The dads were there, on the ground, ready to go in. Every cell in their bodies screamed at them to go in and get that deranged fucker who was slaughtering their kids. They were, I suspect, more than capable. For reasons both sane and insane, reasons both logical and maddeningly bureaucratic, they were blocked from doing so by officials.
I believe these men’s rage, focus, and adrenaline would have led to the shooter’s death within minutes. Some of the dads may have died in the ambush. I wonder how many of the men who lost their child this week wish they had died, instead of living with the feeling they are living with now.
I’m not an evolutionary psychologist, but I think like one, and the rage and frustration of these dads and community men who wanted—needed—to get into that school to save those kids is a primal scream I hear from 300 miles away. These men were built to protect. They were, essentially, made to go into that school that day. Hundreds of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer human evolution, not to mention basic mammalian instinct, is baked into their DNA.
I realize many of the cops and agents on the scene that day are dads and community protectors and fall into this cohort. On Tuesday, their instincts were being short-circuited, too.
How we live today, our current system, is so buggy with conflicting hard realities and rules and shifting new “norms” that humans aren’t allowed to be human anymore. That includes the shooter—a lonely and disturbed teenager, lost in the morass of contemporary society’s ills—his isolated online life, his mother’s drug addiction, no father, pandemic disruption. A kid’s misery and mental unraveling, unchecked.
Have I mentioned all the guns yet? All the guns within yards of the school, on the bodies of the dads and men (and women, for that matter) who wanted so desperately to get in. We have all these guns because our divided society does not work. We buy our guns while imagining the worst because the worst happens, but the worst happens because there are so many damn guns. Another mass shooting happens and, like clockwork, more guns flood into the system, flood into the communities that grasp for ways to protect their kids, their neighborhoods, themselves from the bad guys. How’s that going?
Historically, for millennia, during the long hunter-gatherer era that shaped modern human brains—the brains we have to this very day—a child with anti-social traits would have been 1) raised by the whole village, and everyone would have been aware of his weirdness; 2) he would have been channeled into some daily capacity that contained his worst, and; 3) if he went off the rails anyway or posed any danger, he would have angered a villager—probably a father—who would have killed him. That, or the village would have voted to push him off a cliff. End of story.
Those men (not to mention all the moms, which I hope is obvious) begging the cops to let them storm the school, stop the killer (by any means), and save those kids are fully human—they are all of us. This is who we are, but we can’t realize who we are because for every fact of human nature, there is something in contemporary society that denies it, blocks it, corrupts it, distorts it. A dad can’t be a dad if he can’t take out the sad weirdo who comes after his children. A mom can’t be a mom if she can’t take out the sad weirdo who comes after her children.
(The parents’ cries in the below video are devestating.)
I don’t know the tangle of bureaucratic remits that kept the cops from going in for a full hour after the shooter entered the school. I suspect we’ll be hearing more about that. But spare a thought for the dads, who would have, could have, and for the rest of their grief-stricken lives, will believe that they should have gone in, despite being told no. These men will not sleep well. They did not get to do the thing they were made to do, at the most fundamental, bone-deep level. Protect their community’s children. Protect their own child. Take out the bad guy.
The dads who didn’t even have a gun on them would have gone in too, you know. They just would have.
Hi Christina, I see that Andrew Sullivan highlighted a quotation from you in his weekly newsletter sent out Fridays:
"In The ‘Stacks
Christina Rees hears the “primal scream” of the fathers of the Uvalde victims prevented from entering the school. “Graham” defends the cops. With guns now the leading killer of kids and teens, where’s the pro-life movement? David French pushes for “red flag laws.” Jim Swift wants to go slow with gun reform — because incrementalism works. David Lat starts a debate with readers over repealing the Second Amendment."
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/can-a-cult-become-a-movement
A million times, yes. Fuck.