Bay Area not immune to sickness
Ispent Wednesday morning watching the anguish of survivors and others affected by the recent shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, as they testified at the congressional hearing on gun violence. One mother told committee members of the broken promise of ice cream after school. Another invited politicians to help her clean her son’s wounds so they could witness the carnage of the bullets. An 11-yearold described the last moments of her teacher, her friend and how she smeared blood on her own body to play dead. A doctor described the unidentifiable, pulverized and decapitated bodies, and pleaded for lawmakers to do their jobs.
Listening to these stories of individuals and whole communities marked by gun violence were hard enough to take in on their own but the accounts hit me even harder because just last week, the same thing could have happened at my nephew’s high school in Berkeley.
On May 21, police received a tip that a 16-year-old boy was plotting an attack at Berkeley High School. After obtaining a warrant, police searched the teen’s home and found a collection of assault rifles and bomb making material. The teen was allegedly trying to recruit other students to help carry out an attack. Fortunately, after police searched his home, the student turned himself in and was arrested.
This incident occurred a week after a 17-year-old was shot at the park across from the high school, a little over a month after a beloved senior at the high school died in a fall witnessed by other students.
To say that the kids are not OK is beyond an understatement.
We do not live in a red city, red county or a red state. I don’t know a single person who owns a gun, or admits to it. There were more Bernie Sanders lawn signs in our city than most, a place often mocked and dismissed as being so far left, it is sometimes dubbed the People’s Republic of Berkeley.
But it happened here.
I don’t need to list the litany of shootings that have occurred nationally over the past 24, 48 or even 72 hours. And it shouldn’t need restating that there is a profound need for stricter gun laws, mandatory background checks and waiting periods. But to pretend that this is only a gun control issue is to do a greater disservice to our kids than we have already done, after traumatizing generations of them with the very real notion that school can instantly transform into a war zone.
Two major pediatric organizations declared in the fall that we are in a mental health national emergency for children and adolescents, an announcement that created hardly a ripple. Around that time, the school district in Oakland decided that this would be a good time to announce across the board school closures in some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic — to take some of the most impacted, most vulnerable kids who lost the highest number of family and friends during the pandemic, and shut down their neighborhood schools. All this in a state where our governor recently boasted of a near $100 billion budget surplus.
The same day I heard about the averted shooting at Berkeley High School, I attended my other nephew’s eighth-grade promotion. I tried to reflect back the joy he and his friends were feeling in that moment. Their faces beamed, fresh off the challenges of a middle-school experience forever marked by COVID and remote learning, eager to take their next step. But I knew what their next step was — to attend the local high school where a mass shooting had just been thwarted.
It was hard to harness the joy. We have lost over a million and counting during this pandemic, driven largely by abject failures at local, state and national levels. We continue to lose record numbers to drug and alcohol-related deaths as well as suicide — what are called deaths of despair. Unless we reckon with the fact that these mass shootings are yet another manifestation of the sickness of the kind of society we have created, where a small sector of the super elite make decisions for the majority, where the huge amount of wealth generated only benefit a select few, where certain deaths are considered “acceptable,” none of us will ever be safe.
As a health care worker, I can attest to the fact that none of us are OK, either, both on the provider side and on the patient side. There is suicide in the air. A friend who is a mental health worker recently shared she was emerging from a period of suicidality. Another friend, a nurse, had a suicide attempt a few months ago. Two nurses at two different hospital systems in the Bay Area died by suicide.
When I had to take my mom to the emergency room a few weeks back, I told the clinician how sorry I was to hear of their colleague’s death by suicide at a sister hospital. She thanked me for the acknowledgment and shared that the suicide had affected the staff in profound ways, “Because we are all right there, you know.”
Because we are all right there.