My Brain was Interrupted

 

 

I don’t know how writers, particularly nonfiction writers trying to compose essays about real and perhaps current events, stick with a topic when a more pressing one emerges.  I was in the middle of writing about my recent road trip through West Virginia, a short account about people I met and things I learned when I was completely interrupted by national news.  Emotionally ripped away by the slaughter of fellow Americans in an upstate New York supermarket and an elementary school.  It’s been hard for me to think about anything else.

I read a New York Times account of the newest classroom tragedy, after hearing earlier reports from news conferences held by local officials at the scene.  The news comes at you in so many ways these days.  I was listening to an NPR interview in my car in which an expert of some kind was talking about nineteen children killed in one classroom.  The NPR interviewer, to his credit, asked this question.

 “Do you know for a fact they were all in the same classroom?”

“No, I don’t.  I assume so because Texas mandates no more than 22 kids in one classroom.  It just makes sense to me.  But no, I don’t know.”

It made sense to me, and I accepted his assumption.  Until my brother called.  My brother, older than me and as tuned in as anyone I know to the news, was the first to suggest otherwise.

“I couldn’t sleep the other night, got up, and tuned in to cable news.   Now they’re saying he was in more than one room.  The rooms are adjoined.  There were more than nineteen kids who went through that hell. Some lived through it.”

I had been grieving for nineteen kids, and two teachers (team teaching perhaps?) all of whom died.  Now my grief expanded to include the lifelong impact that experience would have on those who were in those rooms but live on.

For thirty-some years I was the director of a youth service/child welfare agency that expanded its expertise and programming from troubled teens, including runaways and those caught up in the juvenile justice system, to include services for those suffering neglect and physical and sexual abuse.  It was the sexual abuse that was most chilling, although it is open to debate as to which experience is most devastating.

Physical abuse and neglect are at least understandable to the public.  Sexual abuse was a taboo rarely considered until the mid-80s.  In the early days when Americans first felt able to openly talk about the sexual abuse of children, after a network news show called “Something About Amanda” starring Ted Danson, my staff couldn’t make a public presentation about our sexual abuse treatment program without some adult coming up after the talk and divulging their own traumatic experience.  The lid came off the dynamics of sexual abuse, most often familial, and the specter of its damage, the sheer extent of the trauma suffered by those abused and not believed, or never sharing their secret, was breathtaking.

It was my job as director of a child welfare agency to read and sign unusual incident reports, familiarize myself with court reports being submitted by my staff, to understand the problems confronting both the children and families we served but also the depth to which our staff and foster parents were affected by hearing their stories.  It was as simple as taking the material from my inbox, mail received and information from staff, walking back to my office, sitting down, and reading it.  What I read was often horrific.

And confidential.  Children and families involved in our child welfare, juvenile justice, and family court systems have a right to privacy.  I could talk to my staff who were involved about what I was reading, and I did often, but not to family and friends close to me.  It was hard.  I knew things about my community that others did not, and I couldn’t talk about it.

I retired over ten years ago. Things have changed. Privacy laws and confidentiality measures have remained the same, but we have changed our attitudes about volunteering information about ourselves.  Social media has made us all reporters.  Both journalists and everyday people are giving us more information than ever before.  You must look at it closely for accuracy, but there is no shortage of material to review.  In fact, I sometimes feel we’re drowning in it.

After the initial press conference following the mass murder in a Uvalde Texas elementary school, in which the Governor of the state flanked by its ranking U.S. Senator and others told the world a school resource officer confronted the gunman and brave law enforcement officials ran towards the deadly attacker, we learned otherwise.

The school resource officer was not on school grounds.  Upon returning to his post, he drove past the alleged killer who was in the vicinity of his wrecked truck, and never challenged the alleged killer’s entry into the school he was hired to protect.  (I’m dropping the alleged adjective.  To my attorney friends, I admit I’m wrong to do so.)  The killer entered the school through a propped open side door.  He shot his way into a classroom before the teacher could lock it.  That room adjoined another classroom, and methodically, over time, he killed both teachers and students in both rooms with an AR-15-style rifle he’d purchased legally days earlier on his 18^th birthday.  He was armed with more rounds of ammunition than is supplied to U.S. soldiers in battle, clip after clip of deadly merciless bullets.  Shell casings at the scene told police he had fired 142 rounds of that ammunition.

A law enforcement official in charge, commanding 19 or so armed policemen inside the school, delayed engaging the killer who was inside the classroom for nearly an hour until proper equipment and additional personnel arrived.  Even after they arrived.  His rationale was that the threat of further death was over, and the shooter barricaded in the room was no longer a danger.  He was wrong.

Journalists have helped us reconstruct the scene inside that classroom by conducting sensitive interviews in which survivors and their families agreed to participate.  CNN reporter Norah Neus interviewed Miah Cerrillo, age 11, who was wounded but survived in her fourth-grade classroom where so many of her classmates died.

Present at the interview was Miah’s mother.   Miah was scared to speak on camera, or to a man, because of what she experienced but told CNN she wanted to share her story so people can know what it’s like to live through a school shooting.  She hopes that speaking out can prevent a tragedy like the one she experienced from happening to other kids.

There was a time when journalists would never expose children to this type of coverage.  Again, times have changed.  Miah and her family freely consented to allow her voice to be heard.

Click this link, and click the redirect notice to view the video

Norah Tells Miah's Story

The story recalled in the video is hard to hear.  It’s a memory that will never be erased in her mind.  Hopefully, it can be dealt with in therapy and its impact blunted, the damage contained at some level.  The video speaks for itself.  If Miah is brave enough to share her story, I think we should listen.  It’s 6 minutes and 47 seconds out of your day.

Near the end of the tape, CNN reporter Norah Neus mentions something that struck a chord with me as a former supplier of therapy to survivors of trauma in a rural area.  You can hear Norah’s words in the video about the question of therapy for Miah.  They go something like this.

“Miah’s parents are trying to get her some kind of therapy help, they’ll probably have to drive to San Antonio for that.  They’re starting a Go Fund Me page.”

Excuse me, but it’s bullshit that the parents of victims should be left to their own devices to get help for their kids.  There should have been social workers in that community starting to gather resources and bring help to that community the day after the shooting.  San Antonio is 83 miles away from Uvalde.  Google maps says it’s an hour and twenty-minute trip.  It’s not just Miah that needs help.  Parents and students throughout the school need help.  Teachers need help.  Extended family members need help.  And police and first responders will need a whole lot of help after this one.

Some will require good debriefing, an assessment, and a limited amount of follow-up sessions.  Others will require medication and ongoing psychotherapy for years.  They deserve great care, and they deserve to have it delivered to them in their own community.

I’m not a trained psychotherapist by any means but I could write a budget for a project like this.  I’d start with staff: a team of well-trained and experienced therapists, supported by consulting psychiatrists including a child psychiatrist.  I’d give them a good case manager (maybe more depending on the numbers) that can visit kids at home, with their families, and in the community.  Included should be community education about trauma, and integration with natural supports in the community like churches, police, and whatever exists to support kids and families.

And rather than choosing which resources to provide from a fixed number of dollars picked out of the sky, I would budget whatever it costs to make this happen.  Is there an existing building that can be remodeled and furnished as an inviting, comfortable place for therapy to be delivered?  Then rent it and get that done.  Is there nothing suitable?  Then build one.  There is work to be done in Uvalde, Texas for years and years.  And Buffalo.  And on and on and on.

Come to think of it, it’s not just victims of mass shootings that need this kind of help.  Victims surviving daily gun violence in cities and towns across the country suffer from trauma.  In our data-rich world, I think we could map the incidence of gun violence and find neighborhoods and communities that need a large amount of mental health treatment but have no local source of help.  Let’s set up centers there too.

And for God’s sake let’s not depend on Go Fund Me as the way to pay for this help.  Our states and the federal government should provide comprehensive and ongoing treatment for their citizens as long as it persists in allowing such senseless violence to occur and until it stops it.  If it proves expensive, I suggest a healthy tax collected from gun manufacturers and sellers.  It’s an industry you know.  They should bear the burden of the havoc their products wreak out of the profits they enjoy in our capitalist system just as oil companies fund the clean up of petroleum spills that foul our environment.  Money should not be the issue.

Helping Miah and her family and others like them should be the issue.  We should be guided by what they want and need to be whole and healthy once again.   And we shouldn’t rest until that job is done.